She wasn’t bleeding from her eyeballs yet, he noted. That put her ahead of several Mages he’d known who’d lived through their exertions.
“I still need a Ship’s Mage when this is over,” he warned, glancing over the top of the barricade. “There were more than two. I’d say at least five shooters before. Where are the rest?”
“Coming,” Reyes told him—and there was something wrong with the security trooper’s voice. David looked over to see that the man’s face had gone deathly pale.
“They’re in armor.”
David turned back over the barricade to confirm what his man had said. Four more troops with ballistic shields and MACCAW-9s were coming around the corner—following two in dark gray unmarked exosuit battle armor.
Nothing they had was even going to scratch that.
“Maria?” David asked, somewhat helplessly, as he ducked behind the magically formed barricade for cover.
His Ship’s Mage shook her head.
“I’ve got the armor on the right if you’ve got the rest,” she told him bluntly.
“Unless someone is packing magic armor-piercing rounds, we’re in serious trouble,” David replied, glancing over at Skavar. “Chief?”
“I have a monomolecular knife that might get through the armor,” the gaunt ex-Marine replied. “If they get that close.”
David closed his eyes, inhaling deeply and listening to the sound of heavy rifle fire slamming into their cover. Soprano had clearly done more than just move the metal into place in front of them, as the rifles the armored attackers were carrying should have punched clean through the station’s interior walls.
“Do what you can,” he ordered.
He felt as much as heard Soprano’s nod of agreement. As he opened his eyes again, his Mage was rising to her full height, energy flaring into existence around her hands as she drew on her power again.
Lightning crackled in the corridor as Soprano sent a cascading crash of power along the hallway at the two armored soldiers. Mere focused lines of fire like she’d used on the ballistic shields wouldn’t suffice against exosuits. Those were designed to give mundane soldiers half a fighting chance against Mages.
In an open battle, fresh and prepared, Maria Soprano could have taken an entire squad of exosuited soldiers. Today, at the edge of her reserves, she obliterated just one before she collapsed to the ground.
From the screaming, at least one of the unarmored soldiers had been caught in the blast as well, but Soprano was down too. David crawled over to her and confirmed his worst fears: she’d been hit.
The bad news was that she’d taken a round from one of the exosuits’ heavy battle rifles. The good news was that it had been an armor-piercing round and had punched clean through her shoulder blade before continuing on its way.
That wasn’t going to save her if she didn’t get prompt medical attention, but it meant she wasn’t instantly dead.
“Skavar! Medkit!”
His Chief of Security threw him the small box before popping up to see what was going on.
“Exosuit down. One of the unarmored guys too, plus they’ve got at least one wounded,” he reported as David pulled a tube of auto-coagulant from the kit.
This wasn’t the healthiest thing he could do, but anything else was going to take too long. He dumped the entire tube into the hole through his Mage’s shoulder, blood clotting fast as the pale green foam filled the wound.
The foam itself hardened after a moment, designed for exactly this kind of emergency use, filling the wound and stopping the flow of blood. It would take a surgeon to remove the block of foam now, but Soprano wasn’t bleeding out, either.
“What do we do?” Skavar asked quietly.
“We wait for them to get close,” David admitted. “And you get that knife ready. Reyes, how are you holding up?”
The other security man flipped him an unexpected thumbs-up.
“This is a much nicer place to be than the bug-infested mudhole I was pinned down in last time I thought I was going to die,” the ex-Marine told him. “We’ll be fine.”
“I’m guessing you had air support that time,” David replied. “What do you expect to have this time?”
“No fucking clue,” Reyes said cheerfully. “Station Security seems most likely. Someone has to be paying attention to all of the explosions and gunfire.”
Then David caught the difference. The gunfire peppering their position had stopped. He listened carefully and could hear the heavy thud of exosuit armor approaching.
Apparently, their new friends had decided that penetrators weren’t getting through the barricade, and seemed to be short of grenades.
“Get ready,” he hissed.
Then something exploded. A series of rapid single shots followed, then a second explosion, and then silence.
“Captain David Rice,” a voice called out. “Are you all right?”
“Who the hell are you?” David replied. A rescue sounded hopeful, but he wasn’t feeling particularly trusting.
“The name’s Leonard Conroy,” the speaker said. “You don’t know me, but we have a mutual friend: James Niska.”
That was…unexpected.
Major James Niska was a Legatan Augment super-soldier, trained as a Mage-killer.
And he worked for Legatan Military Intelligence.
19
The hallway was silent for a moment, and then Conroy coughed.
“I hate to rush you, but while there are no cameras back here, you and these idiots made enough noise that something is going to have triggered back in security HQ. Now, your involvement is fine, but I’d really rather not have someone asking pointed questions about where my penetrator rifles came from,” he pointed out.
“Plus, well, New Madagascar is pretty reasonable about magic in self-defense, but it could still take you weeks to extricate your Mage from the mess it would create. I suggest we move.”
David carefully rose back to his feet and looked over the barricade. Two people, a heavyset red-headed man he presumed was Conroy and a tall broad-shouldered woman with short-cropped dark hair.
Both carried the same kind of heavy penetrator battle rifle the exosuits had been wielding, a weapon that easily weighed twenty-five kilograms and had enough recoil to put a gorilla on its ass. From the shattered suit of power armor and dead cloaked attackers scattered around them, the two strangers had no problem using the guns.
Which meant David’s suspicions were confirmed. He was looking at a pair of Legatan Augments.
“We had to leave one of our crew behind,” he said softly. “They killed her.”
“Fuckers,” Conroy agreed. “Can you show Rihanna?”
“Reyes?”
“Can do,” the trooper replied. “What about Soprano?”
“She took a hit,” David explained.
Conroy crossed to the barricade and gave Reyes a hand over, gesturing him towards the woman.
“Go fetch your friend,” he said gently. “I’ll take Soprano.”
He lightly leapt the hundred-and-twenty-centimeter-tall barricade, landing like a cat next to David and studying Soprano’s unconscious form. He blinked rapidly and then pressed his hand gently against her throat and then her upper arm.
Finally, Conroy looked back up at David.
“She hasn’t lost as much blood as I’d feared,” he said quietly. “Body temperature and blood pressure depressed, and the blood to her arm is dangerously limited. She’ll be fine if we can get her to a doctor.”
He glanced at his gun, then back to Soprano.
“If you take my rifle, I can take her. I’m about ninety percent sure Legacy doesn’t have any more active direct-action assets on Darwin Orbital, so we should be okay.”
“Are you sure?” David asked. “I…” He glanced at the heavy rifle. “I’m not sure I can fire that thing.”
Conroy laughed.
“You’d be surprised,” he said. “We installed after-market venting to reduce the recoil. It’s not per
fect, but you should be able to get a shot off before it knocks you to the ground. I, ah, didn’t leave the Legacy twits’ guns in a useful state, sorry.”
Shields, armor, weaponry…the men and women who’d tried to kill David were in pieces across the hallway. Say what you would about Augments—and David had said much of it himself—they were effective.
“Legacy?” he asked. “Who are these people?”
“Azure Legacy,” Conroy confirmed. “Mikhail Azure’s revenge. More than that, I think we’ll want to discuss somewhere safer. Let’s go.”
To David’s surprise, the extraction back to the inhabited portions of the station went off without a hitch. Conroy led them through a series of side corridors and then through a rear entrance into what appeared to be a small corporate office.
Before Red Falcon’s crew could say anything, however, a pair of white-uniformed EMTs arrived and took Soprano off Conroy’s hands.
“We’ll get her in and treated,” one of them assured Conroy. “Won’t even be a ripple.”
“You’re worth every penny I pay you, Kai,” the Augment replied. “Thanks.”
As the EMTs shuffled Soprano onto a stretcher, David cleared his throat and gestured for Skavar to go with them.
“I can’t leave you on your own,” he objected.
“Chief, if Conroy was going to kill me, we’d all be dead already,” David pointed out. “Go keep an eye on Maria—she needs you more.”
“All right,” Skavar conceded. He turned a point look on Conroy. “If you get any ideas, cyborg, I have an entire platoon of exosuits aboard Falcon. Don’t fuck with my Captain.”
Conroy grinned broadly.
“I believe you, Chief,” he replied, “but, sadly, I’d probably still be more concerned with my boss’s reaction than yours. He’ll be fine. You have my word.”
Skavar grunted disbelievingly, but he followed the EMTs out, leaving David alone with Conroy.
The Augment shrugged.
“Marine, I’m guessing?” he asked David.
“Ex, but yes.”
“The Royal Marines have assumed for a long time that, sooner or later, they’re going to have to fight the Augment Corps,” Conroy said softly. “I can live with his rudeness.”
“I hope so,” David replied. “I wasn’t going to make him apologize. I’m still not sure what the hell is going on here, Mr. Conroy.”
“Fair enough,” the Legatan said with an even wider grin. “Can I get you a drink, Captain? I have some good rum in my office.”
“Sure.”
Conroy led the way into one of the small offices off from the main cubicle area. A wordless command, presumably from some communicator built into his implants, opened a concealed gun safe. The penetrator rifle went into the middle of it, surrounded by a collection of knives and guns of half a dozen manufacturers and varieties.
“So, while I can guess what a covert Augment is doing in New Madagascar, I’m not sure why you saved me,” David admitted.
The Legatan shook his head, pouring two sodas and adding a carefully measured amount of rum and ice to each before sliding one across to David.
“Would it make more sense if I told you that while I wasn’t who you were meeting this evening, I was supposed to be there?” he asked. “Miller knows enough of what the fuck happened that he’s not going to raise any questions, by the way. He sends his apologies.”
“What the hell did happen?”
“Azure Legacy saw an opportunity,” Conroy said flatly. “I knew they had a cell on the station, but I didn’t know what they were doing here. Ground-work and intelligence gathering, from what I could tell—but the moment you showed up they went into action.”
The Augment shook his head.
“They’re not high on my list of priorities, but you are on the absolute top of their list,” he concluded. “And their team here appears to include a damned good hacker. They set you up, tried to eliminate you, and then sent in their direct-action assets when the first attempt failed.
“We didn’t even start looking for you until you were five minutes late,” Conroy admitted. “The station isn’t that big, thankfully, so once we were looking…”
“Okay, so who the hell are Azure Legacy?” David demanded.
“Mikhail Azure’s revenge,” the spy—because that’s what David was quite certain Conroy was—repeated. “He set up a number of closed, numbered accounts before his death to fund them. Their purpose is to remove whoever killed him and…narrow the field for successors for the Blue Star Syndicate.”
“What, he set up a death cult to avenge him?”
“Nothing so dramatic.” Conroy laughed. “But worse. He arranged for lawyers to avenge him. So long as you are alive and the Syndicate is undergoing its continual meltdown, they will fund the Legacy’s operations. Once you’re dead, half of the remaining funds are released as a bonus. Once the Syndicate establishes a new leader, the rest is released.
“There’s enough money in there that’s whoever’s left of the Legacy at that point will be able to retire rich as a king,” the Augment noted. “Mikhail Azure wanted to be very sure that whoever killed him got fucked.”
“What happened if he died of, I don’t know, cancer?” David asked.
“Knowing Azure, the money would go to whoever cured whatever killed him. He was that vindictive.”
David shook his head.
“So, the crime lord I spent years running from is still chasing me, even though he’s dead?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” Conroy confirmed. “Fortunately for you, you’re flagged in my files as a high-value asset. Niska’s notes made it very clear we owed you big-time, though obviously I have no information as to why.”
James Niska had dragged David into a situation where he’d lost one of his oldest friends and nearly lost his ship. The Legatus Military Intelligence Directorate did owe him, though he hadn’t regarded it that way or expected it to be repaid quite so dramatically.
“I’m no one’s asset,” he replied instead.
“In the sense of you’re a shipper we can trust so long as we’re not asking you to break your own codes, you are,” Conroy replied. “I don’t need you to ship slaves or illegal drugs, after all, Captain.”
“But you do need me to ship something,” David realized.
“I do,” the Augment agreed. “But for now, I think I should make sure you get back to your ship safely.” A grim look crossed his face. “I’m relatively sure the Legacy is out of their own muscle here, but that doesn’t mean they can’t hire local.”
20
Absolutely nothing about Shayne Miller suggested that the man would have had anything to do with a Legatan covert operation. He was a pudgy man with a noticeable bald spot and a ready smile, showing every sign of having been the baker his company made a big deal of him starting as.
Of course, Shayne Miller had been that baker in his twenties and was now several years into his second century. He’d had time to turn a successful corner bakery into a planetwide food and agricultural empire.
“I have to apologize for the problems you encountered last night,” he told David as soon as he’d passed Skavar’s security screen at the boarding hatch onto Red Falcon. “For my home to play host to such criminality! I am mortified.”
“It’s everywhere, unfortunately, Mr. Miller,” David replied. “We have a meeting room standing by. Could I get you something to eat or drink?”
Miller smiled and rolled the oversized briefcase he’d brought with him around in front.
“This has enough of the finest coffee and breakfast pastries my companies produce for myself and your senior officers,” he told David. “A handcart with enough for the rest of your crew—I took the liberty of looking up the company size of an AAFHF in Martian service before I came out—will be arriving in a few minutes.
“Consider it my apology for last night’s incident; it’s the least I can do!”
David smiled and accepted the case of food. The gesture
amused him—it was warm, friendly, impossible to argue with…and neatly undercut any argument for demanding more actual money for the delivery.
“It’s a pleasure working with you, Mr. Miller,” he said with a nod.
Some of the florid cheer faded as Miller stepped into David’s office, taking a seat without waiting for it to be offered.
“The coffee is a gift,” he reiterated, “but I would be most appreciative if you’d spare a cup.”
“Gladly,” David told him, carefully pouring two mugs and sliding one across the table. “I was up early, checking on my Mage.”
Miller nodded slowly, a flash of discomfort passing over his face but quickly disappearing.
“I’ve touched base with Cinnamon Station General Hospital One myself,” he said. “Officially, Ms. Soprano was in an unfortunate industrial accident and was never anywhere near the godawful mess they discovered in the uninhabited section of the station.”
He smiled thinly.
“Conroy refused to elaborate to me on what happened beyond that he saved you from some attack. I don’t poke at that man’s business as a rule, but I hope that things didn’t go too badly…”
“I lost a crewwoman,” David said shortly. “I’d call that going pretty badly.”
“Damn. So would I. My condolences, Captain.” Miller shook his head. “One never believes this kind of incident would happen in one’s home. What a mess.”
“From what I can tell, I brought my own problems with me,” David replied. “You know Conroy, though?”
“As much as anyone knows the Conroys,” the New Madagascan businessman confirmed. “Well enough to know that they’re not merely the trade factors they officially are. They don’t cause problems for my planet, I don’t ask too many questions.”
He shrugged.
“I keep an ear to the ground on their activities,” he admitted, “and if I thought they were a problem, I’d have told the authorities, but they seem quite on the up-and-up for, well, smugglers.”
David snorted. There were tiers of ethics and morals among smugglers. He’d classed himself in the category more than once, after all.
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