“Cinnamon Station confirms fifteen-thousand-kilometer safety radius and wishes us a safe flight,” Campbell told him. “We’re clear to bring the engines online.”
“Let’s be a bit more sparing of the antimatter this time,” David told her. “New Madagascar had to import their Navy-required stockpile; I sincerely doubt we’ll be able to refuel there.”
“We have enough fuel to visit two systems after that before needing more AM,” his XO pointed out. “Are you planning on swanning us through every UnArcana world you can find?”
“Dear God, no,” he replied with a laugh. Soprano might have been okay with visiting one, but he wasn’t going to drag his Mages through multiple UnArcana worlds in a row. “I don’t want a repeat of some of our last trips.”
Campbell shook her head.
“So far, boss, since getting this ship, two groups of people have tried to kill you and we’ve been dragged into one major political crisis,” she said. “This all feels far too familiar. Are you sure Damien was our bad-luck charm?”
“Never was,” he said softly. “I got Damien in trouble first, if you recall. No, I’m pretty sure I’m the trouble magnet around here, Jenna. Me and my unwillingness to turn down a sob story or a sucker in trouble.”
She shook her head at him.
“Which is why we’re flying a freighter with the guns of a pocket warship and an entire platoon of Marines aboard,” she pointed out. “Your white-knight habit seems to have made you some friends along the way.”
“Skipper, you need to take a look at this,” Acconcio interrupted. “I just picked up a ghost on the long-range passives.”
“Our friend from before?” David asked.
“I can’t be sure,” the gunner admitted. “She’s quite a distance away and, well, it could just be a sensor glitch.”
“Intercept course?”
“No,” Acconcio said. “She’s ballistic along our path, though. Watching for us to jump, I think.”
“And then going to follow and ambush us between the stars.” David shook his head. “Any sign of friends?”
“Just the one. We could take her.”
“If she’s the same pocket corvette we saw last time,” Campbell said. “You said yourself, Iovis, we can’t be certain.”
“No, she’s just going to try and play the same game as last time,” the Captain concluded. “She knows where we’re going; there’s no hiding the kind of deal Silk Star closed with us. So, she’ll meet us one or two light-years out, along the standard jump route.”
David smiled and opened a channel to the simulacrum chamber.
“Mage Soprano? Do you have that course we discussed set up?” he asked.
“First four jumps are eleven light-months,” she confirmed. “That’s going to suck for some of my Mages, just so you know. I suggest we take at least a twelve-hour rest after the short-jump sequence; it actually takes more out of my people.”
“I don’t argue with experts,” David told her. He understood enough of what the Jump Mages were doing that he could review their calculations. Tradition said he didn’t—that was Soprano’s job and he was expected to let the Mages work their magic without supervision—but he knew how.
And he knew she was right.
“We’ll be at jump distance in four hours,” he continued. “It’s going to take them more than twelve hours to work out just what the hell we did. If you’re concerned, I suggest we hold for a day in deep space to make sure your people are fully recovered.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Soprano admitted. “Costa especially will need it.”
“We’ve got almost a week of extra time built into our contract,” David told her. “With four Mages aboard, we can take a day.
“Just like we can waste a good chunk of our first four jumps to make sure we’re safe.”
“They’ll never know where we went,” she promised.
Eight hours later, Maria kicked Costa out of the simulacrum chamber, sending the jump mage off to sleep. She took one quick glance around to make sure everything in the starship’s magical heart was functioning as expected, and then moved into her office.
A Ship’s Mage’s office was a cross between a flight control center, an administrator’s cubicle and a jeweler’s workbench. A collection of tools for working with the silver polymer of the runes woven throughout the ship—and each of the Jump Mages’ palms—were laid along the workbench at one end of the room, while a multi-monitor structure was set up to allow three-dimensional viewing of the area around the ship.
On a ship like Red Falcon, with multiple Mages, each of the Mages also had their own desk with half-height cubicle dividers. There wasn’t much administration beyond the jump calculations to be done, but the Mages needed space to do it.
With all of her juniors asleep, Maria tucked herself into the course-plotting station and began the slow, careful process of validating just where the big freighter had ended up. She knew her own jump had been exactly eleven light-months, to within a thousand kilometers.
She was not nearly so certain about any of her subordinates. The exact distances hadn’t been a big deal while jumping. Usually, a Mage only had to make one short jump in an entire trip, for the final arrival, a task that Maria had been keeping to herself so far.
The Navy trained its Mages better for variable jumps than civilian Jump Mage training did. It was an exhausting, uncomfortable process, requiring far more fine-tuning of the spell than normal. She’d have been surprised if any of her juniors had actually nailed the jump exactly.
As Red Falcon’s computers began to correlate the stars around her against the immensely detailed charts stored in their files, however, she realized she was doing them a disservice. Across four jumps with four different Mages, they had overshot their forty-four-light-month goal by less than a light-second.
That was actually better than she would have expected from a Navy crew. She owed her people a beer.
“Got a minute, Maria?” Acconcio’s voice asked from the door. She looked up from her calculations, realizing she hadn’t closed it behind her.
“We’re not jumping for a day,” she told him. “I can spare a few. What’s up?”
The heavyset ex-warrant officer pulled a chair from one of the desks and looked at the star charts.
“Are we where we expected to be?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she confirmed. “Closer than I expected. Still another twenty-three jumps to go to New Madagascar, but we’ll be off from the normal route the whole way. May as well be invisible.”
Acconcio shook his head.
“Just what did you get me into, Maria?” he asked. “Assassination and blackmail, political crises, stealth ships stalking us… My time in the Navy was quieter!”
“Did you even look at the Captain’s history before you signed on?” Maria replied. “Rice basically waged a one-man war on the Blue Star Syndicate—and one of the largest criminal organizations in the galaxy came off the worse out of the equation!”
To Maria’s surprise, the man sitting across from her flushed, a bright red that showed even through his dark complexion.
“Honestly?” he half-muttered. “I looked long enough to know you were aboard, and that was about all the research I did. Not many civilian ships needing real gunners—and only one ship out there with Maria Soprano aboard.”
That was not the response Maria had expected. It implied an interest she hadn’t realized was there…an interest that would have been very against regulations when she was a tactical officer and Acconcio one of her warrants.
“My poor Iovis,” she said softly. “I knew what I was getting into. I didn’t mean to drag you into trouble alongside me!”
“No place I’d rather be,” he admitted. “Sorry, didn’t mean to—”
She put her hand on his, cutting off whatever he was saying.
“No apologies,” she ordered. “I didn’t know. Give me some time to process, okay?”
He chuckled.
“I ain’t going anywhere,” he replied. “I may have leapt before I looked, but this is a damned fine ship and I’m on board. To the end.”
“Thank you,” Maria said. “I’ll try not to get us killed first!”
Acconcio laughed.
“My impression, my dear Maria, is that Captain Rice is the one likely to get us all killed!”
The rhythm of the ship seemed to miss a beat when they drifted in deep space for an extended period. The patterns and activity of a starship in motion were calibrated around the jumps. No matter how long they went between them, a ship’s crew adapted to that time and everything ended up scheduled around them.
A jump wasn’t particularly unpleasant, but no one wanted to be in the middle of things when one happened.
An extended gap between jumps threw that habit entirely to the wind. Everyone knew they’d be back to the every-two-hour metronome soon enough, but there was a chance to do some longer tasks. If they’d been farther along their trip, Maria figured Kellers would have had something for the crew to do, but as it was, there really wasn’t anything extra to do.
All that was left was a disconcerted, unbalanced feeling that followed her through the ship until she ended up at Captain Rice’s office. She hadn’t quite realized that was where she was heading, but she shrugged and chimed for admittance.
“Come in!”
She stepped through the door and dropped into the chair across from the Captain. Rice, for his part, suspended whatever file was on his screen and leaned back to look at her in silence for several seconds.
“What can I help you with, Maria?” he finally asked.
“Just feeling out of sorts,” she admitted. “New ship, new crew, new rhythms. Brain’s all over the place.”
He raised a questioning eye at her.
“Has your brain actually settled since leaving the Navy?” he asked softly. “It took me two years to get used to all of the changes, and I’d been planning my retirement for a year.”
“It wasn’t really unexpected by the time the court-martial wrapped up,” Maria admitted. “It was clear pretty quickly which way the winds were going to blow.” She sighed. “Honestly, the surprise was that they didn’t throw me in a Navy prison with a dishonorable discharge to boot.”
“From second-in-command of a Navy destroyer to first officer on a merchant freighter in ten months,” Rice said. “That’s quite the shift. Give yourself some time.”
“Fair,” she allowed with a smile. “I hadn’t looked at it that way.” She looked around his office. It was surprisingly plain still. She’d half-expected him to fill it with memorabilia from his past—the man certainly had enough of it.
The only pieces of memorabilia, though, were a standing model of a Venice-class freighter and a picture of a pale woman with flaming red hair and bright green eyes in a black business suit and visible shoulder holster.
“I have to ask, boss,” she finally said, “what’s your rules on on-ship relationships? There wasn’t anything in the handbook.”
Not that Red Falcon’s handbook was anything except a copy-paste of the standard Guild rules.
She hadn’t made up her mind about Iovis Acconcio yet—she’d been enjoying having her bed to herself far more than she’d expected, given her usual habits—but she was certainly more interested than she would have expected if someone had suggested it a week before.
Rice laughed.
“Rules? What rules?” he asked dryly. “LaMonte seems to make a habit of bedding Ship’s Mages and, from what I can tell, had some kind of fling with Kelzin that ended with a disturbing degree of amicability.”
“What habit?” Maria asked. She didn’t know anything about Costa or Lakeland bedding the engineer, but…
“She was dating my last Ship’s Mage, the only one aboard,” Rice replied. “And she’s been spending her time with Xi Wu. I specifically have not been paying enough attention to see if the two are doing more than making friends, but the way Kellers framed it to me…”
“That…explains where my best junior Mage keeps disappearing to,” Maria said with a smile. “Some ships are strict about that.”
“So long as it doesn’t cause trouble, I don’t care,” he told her. “When it comes to junior officers and ratings, I expect their senior officers to yank it up before it becomes a problem. When it comes to senior officers, I expect you to know better than to be a problem.
“Clear-enough rules?”
She laughed, the moment of humor breaking a dark cloud she’d barely realized was settling in on her.
“Clear enough, skipper. Thanks.”
“I like a smooth ship. So long as we have a smooth ship, I have no complaints.”
17
Logically, once Red Falcon was avoiding the standard jump coordinates of the route between Cinnamon and New Madagascar, there was no way they could have been intercepted. While David was well aware that Trackers existed, they were thankfully few and far between, hunters available only to the highest levels of the criminal underworld.
Nonetheless, the entire trip had him jumping at shadows, and he greeted their arrival in New Madagascar with a sigh of relief.
“Mr. Acconcio,” he said aloud. “Are we clear?”
“Sensors are drinking deep, skipper,” the gunner replied. “Looks it so far, but Madagascar isn’t quite as clean and pretty as Cinnamon was. More debris out there.”
Cinnamon had a notably low level of debris. New Madagascar was more normal. Six rocky inner worlds orbited close to a burning furnace of a massive A-type blue star, only the sixth cool enough to be habitable. A thick asteroid belt sat outside those worlds, with four smaller gas giants orbiting at the edge of the system.
Ten worlds, a planet’s worth of asteroids, a few billion comets and meteorites. In theory, almost anything could be hidden out there.
In practice, starship engines were visible from a long way away, and anything that hoped to catch Red Falcon without lighting up the entire star system with their engines would need to be close enough to show up regardless.
“I’ve got one more jump-ship, coming in from the other side of the system,” Acconcio reported. “Reading about sixty in-system ships of various types, including an even dozen Legatan-built gunships.”
He shook his head.
“Jump-ship is a freighter,” he continued. “Not sure of class, but given her heat signature and acceleration, she’s running about six million tons loaded. On the small end of midsize.
“Threat board is clear,” he concluded. “Our stalker hasn’t shown up yet, and once we’re in the cover of those gunships, he won’t want to play.”
“Any chance of someone hiding in the mining platforms or ships?” David asked. New Madagascar paid for its imports by exporting rare earths and heavy metals extracted from that massive asteroid belt. It was wealthier than many Fringe worlds, thanks to the ease of access to those resources.
“It’s always possible,” Acconcio said. “But none of the ships out there are the right size to be our stalker. Most of them are fifty to eighty k-tons—in-system small fry—or multimegaton in-system haulers.
“Pretty sure we’re clear.”
“Thank you, Iovis,” David told him. “Jenna, ping the gunships and the orbital with our bona fides and let them know we’re on our way in. Someone down there has the munchies, and we’ve got twenty million tons of snacks for them!”
Somehow, Maria wasn’t surprised to find Acconcio outside the door of her office as Red Falcon began her final approach to Darwin Orbital. He wore a broad grin and was carrying a bunch of flowers she had no idea how he’d managed to acquire aboard the starship—Falcon had a small hydroponics section to help with oxygen recycling and provide fresh vegetables on longer voyages, but it wouldn’t normally be growing roses!
“Iovis,” she laughed at him. “Where did you find roses?”
“Went in with LaMonte on bribing Tech Suero,” he said cheerfully. “They worked out quite nicely for her and Xi Wu, from sh
ip scuttlebutt.”
“I’m not a star-struck twenty-four-year-old who hasn’t been surprised with flowers aboard ship before,” Maria said, mock-scoldingly. “What do you want, Iovis?”
“Well, I wanted to give you roses,” he said reasonably. “And then, as it happens, I’ve pulled a directory of restaurants aboard Darwin Orbital, and there is a top-ranked North American–style steakhouse aboard which just happened to have a reservation free tonight.
“Only for two, of course.”
She laughed.
“Do I want to know what that cost you?”
“Only if it would make you more likely to come to dinner with me,” Acconcio told her. “I’m pretty sure the bribe is transferrable, if tonight doesn’t work!”
“That’s good,” Maria told him seriously. “The Captain and I are meeting with the client in about two hours, which I would expect to overrun when I’d be able to do dinner.” She held up a finger on her left hand while her right hand slipped the roses out of the gunner’s grip.
In another UnArcana system she might worry about going aboard station, but New Madagascar was supposed to be forgiving so long as she didn’t actually use magic in front of people.
“So, if you, Mr. Iovis Acconcio, can get that reservation shifted to tomorrow night, I would be delighted to meet you for dinner—but duty calls tonight!”
He sighed and bowed his head in mock dismay.
“The Captain doesn’t really need you,” he said, but he was grinning as he said it.
“Maybe not,” she agreed. “But he’s taking me, he’s taking Skavar, and he’s carrying a goddamn pistol. After the last few trips, Rice isn’t going anywhere without babysitters.” She shook her head. “The man is a magnet for trouble.”
“That he is,” Acconcio agreed softly. “I’ll hold you to that promise,” he told her. “I’ll get the reservation shifted and be around to pick you up bang on eighteen hundred OMT tomorrow!”
She laughed again and squeezed his hand. His adorable semi-awkwardness had helped make up her mind. It seemed to work for him.
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