Interstellar Mage

by Glynn Stewart

  She was giving him more benefit of the doubt than he’d expected and he stretched his memory.

  “It was a multi-launcher, capable of launching both rockets and grenades,” he concluded. “I wasn’t exactly catching the brand, but I only know two companies that make systems like that: Legatus Arms and Martian Armaments.”

  Nguyen sighed.

  “We have four Martian Armaments fifty-five-millimeter multi-launchers in our inventory,” she said quietly. “I’m not going to believe you without question, Captain, but I am going to see just where my multi-launchers were last night.

  “But I will get to the bottom of this,” she promised him. “If you’re lying to me, I owe it to my men who died to see justice done. If you’re not…there are least three dirty cops still under my command, and I owe it to the rest of my men to see justice done.

  “Do you understand me, Captain?”

  The cop left, leaving Soprano and David alone.

  “That is going to be a giant disaster,” he admitted.

  “She has a stick up her ass, but it’s a police-issue stick,” Soprano told him. “If her people are dirty, she’ll burn it out.”

  “We can hope,” David said. History wasn’t quite as assured on cops removing their bad apples as Soprano sounded. “The whole mess was a disaster. Is Boots okay?”

  “Yeah, he’s two rooms down, sleeping off a SmartDart,” she told him. “Same with Campbell, Reyes and Nejem. Everyone is fine.”

  “Good.” He glanced around the room. Unless Nguyen was less competent than he expected, they were bugged. That meant there was an entire aspect of the fight that he needed to talk to Soprano about that he couldn’t.

  He wasn’t sure he trusted her. There were too many missing pieces on too many of his officers—but at the same time, MISS seemed to be watching his back and that meant they almost certainly had someone on his crew.

  “It doesn’t look like Nguyen’s going to let you out,” his Mage concluded. “I’ve got the off-loading continuing as planned. I’ll be in touch with Bruno and MacDonald next to make sure everything is still on the level…”

  She shook her head.

  “What else do you need me to do?”

  “Until I’m out of here, you’re in charge,” he told her. “I’m sure the clinic will let you talk to me if you have questions, but I have full faith in your ability to run a ship. While she’s in dock. Cut open by repair teams.”

  His Ship’s Mage laughed at him. Despite his concerns, he liked Soprano. He couldn’t help hoping she wasn’t one of the several spies his ship had clearly acquired.

  “You’re right, I can probably do that,” she admitted. “Is there anything…else?”

  He looked around the room as obviously as he could, driving home the point that they were being listened to.

  “Watch our people,” he ordered quietly. “The Legacy is not done with us yet and this stunt was all rental thugs. If they have their own team or teams here, they aren’t playing yet.”

  “Understood.”

  “But get the ship off-loaded and fixed up as a priority,” he continued. “I want to be the hell and gone away from this place as soon as possible.”

  At this point, he wanted to be as far away from any involvement in the underworld as possible. Turquoise and the Legatans could go hang—he needed to keep his people safe!

  She nodded her agreement.

  “I’ll make it happen, boss,” she promised. “We’ll be on our way.”

  32

  Charity MacDonald looked perfectly calm, despite the fact that one of her business partners was in the ER, a carrier under contract to her company had been shot at, and station police were asking a lot of questions.

  Walton Bruno, on the other hand, did not look calm. The third and most senior partner of Bruno, Boots and MacDonald was an unusually tall man with only the sparsest wisps of white hair remaining on his liver-spotted scalp.

  His eyes were ice-blue and level, but he was pacing back and forth in the meeting room and his hands were visibly trembling.

  “Just what, Mage Soprano…has your Captain…dragged us into?” he asked, pausing repeatedly to breathe heavily. “This whole business…risks our positive…relationships with ASP… which are…essential for our business.”

  Maria managed not to visibly shake her head. She doubted the old man had any illusions about just where Red Falcon’s cargo was coming from. Given that his company was intimately involved in a Legatan covert smuggling operation, to complain about Rice’s problems was hypocritical.

  “My Captain didn’t choose to be attacked by dirty cops,” she pointed out. “That’s not in anyone’s desired schedule.”

  MacDonald laughed.

  “She’s right, boss,” she told Bruno. “Besides, given our delivery delays, the client would be furious if we turned away Falcon’s cargo.”

  Bruno growled.

  “That’s fair, and true,” he allowed. “I apologize, Mage Soprano. I worry…for our people.”

  “We all worry for our own,” Maria allowed. She, for example, currently wasn’t being allowed off the ship without a two-person armed guard. She could, as acting Captain, override Skavar. She wasn’t going to.

  “Is there anything I should know about this client?” she asked politely. She presumed the main one in question was Legatus, but if they would just tell who the cargo was being delivered to…

  “Our stock…in trade, Mage Soprano…is our…confidentiality,” Bruno said, still breathing heavily as he paced. “We give no more…information…than we must. You must be…content with…your money.”

  The old man turned to face her and smiled.

  “It is, after all, quite a bit of money,” he concluded. “Charity?”

  “I presume, Mage Soprano, that you are authorized to sign the releases and paperwork in Captain Rice’s stead?” the heavyset woman demanded.

  “I am Red Falcon’s first officer,” Maria confirmed instantly. “As first officer, Ship’s Mage, and acting Captain, I am authorized to sign on the ship corporation’s behalf.”

  “Good, that does make this simpler,” MacDonald told her, producing a datapad from somewhere on her person. “Shall we?”

  The downside to being accompanied everywhere by armed guards, regardless of whose side those guards were on, was that it made it difficult to do things in secret.

  Maria trusted Skavar’s people, but there was a vast gap between trusting her crew and admitting she was an MISS plant to the same crew. She needed to check in on the status of her trackers, but she couldn’t drop down in a quiet hallway and run the tracing program.

  “Come on, ladies,” she told the two guards with her. “Let’s grab a coffee. I don’t need to be back on the ship just yet, and I could use the break from paperwork.”

  “We just got paid,” Corporal Campo pointed out. “No one’s going to argue with coffee on the multi-million-dollar trip!”

  Maria chuckled. Interstellar carriage rates would have read like highway robbery to Old Earth surface shippers—rarely exceeding single-digit Martian dollars per ton—but twenty million tons of cargo made for a lot of money.

  Of course, most of that money was almost immediately consumed by the operating costs of a ship of that scale, and a good chunk of what was left would be eaten by the deductible on Red Falcon’s repairs. She wasn’t entirely sure what the net profit that Rice would claim on the trip would be, but she suspected it wouldn’t be very much.

  Pirates were murder on the bottom line.

  Walking into one of Anvil Station’s local coffee store chains, Maria ordered three expensive coffees. Passing two on to her guards, she settled down into a corner and opened up her wrist computer’s systems, linking into her tracer program.

  They’d moved over half of the cargo off of Red Falcon toward Anvil Station, and sixty of her seventy trackers had gone with it. At the coffee shop, she was close enough to ping the ones that had moved over, activating their microsecond pulse.

&n
bsp; In theory, the responding pulse was too quick to trigger any sensors looking for bugs. She wasn’t going to rely on that and made sure to save the map of the responses.

  Forty of the trackers were together in one spot, a spot her map quickly confirmed to be Bruno, Boots and MacDonald’s storage warehouse. Ten didn’t respond at all—that wasn’t a surprise; the downside of the trackers being stealthy was that they were also fragile.

  The last ten were also together but not on the station. They were in open space, heading away from Anvil Station.

  “Crap,” she murmured.

  “Ma’am?” Corporal Campo asked over her latte.

  “Nothing,” Maria replied. She had a single location pulse. No vector, no velocity. There wasn’t much she could do with that…but hopefully, MISS had access to the station sensors. Director Choi should be able to identify which ship had been at that location at that time.

  She hit a command to forward the tracker results to Choi, then shut down her PC and drained her coffee.

  “That’s probably enough hanging about,” she told her guards. “Let’s get back to the Falcon.”

  Maria was unsurprised to find an encrypted message waiting for her when she returned to her office aboard Red Falcon. It was easily an hour to get from Anvil Station through the chaos of Foundry Yard Alpha to Red Falcon’s repair slip—more than enough time for MISS to dig through the sensor scans and see where the ship she’d picked up was going.

  To her surprise, however, the message wasn’t a recording or even a long text message. It was simply a com code and an encryption key.

  Shaking her head, the Mage plugged both into her wrist-comp and activated its holographic display. There was no need for this conversation to go through Falcon’s computers.

  The first thing to appear was a floating and gently spinning hourglass, the ancient symbol for “please wait.”

  That suddenly expanded into a holographic cascade of sand that formed into a request for the encryption key.

  Shaking her head, Maria entered the key again. The cascade turned back into an hourglass for a moment—and then the hourglass exploded back into sand that resolved into Director Choi’s face.

  MISS apparently went for fancy hold graphics.

  “Mage Soprano, I’m glad you could reach out,” Choi told her immediately. It appeared the woman in charge of all MISS operations in Svarog had been waiting for her call.

  That…probably wasn’t a good sign.

  “Until Falcon is repaired and Captain Rice is released, I’m surprisingly underemployed for an acting Captain,” Maria replied. “What do you need?”

  “A few things,” Choi admitted. “But for now, I need to update you quickly. First, we’ve already put words in the right ears at ASP. While we don’t have any evidence that Nguyen can use to nail her dirty laundry to the wall, we did feed her enough data that she should be releasing your crew shortly—and she knows where to look to find her problem.”

  “Why didn’t you give her this before?” Maria asked. “Surely, it’s in MISS’s interest to put dirty cops behind bars.”

  “Because we didn’t have it before,” Choi told her. “We pulled it together following up on the attack on Rice. We have significantly more reach without a warrant than Sector Captain Nguyen, but as I said, much of that evidence isn’t admissible in a court of law.”

  The Director smiled thinly.

  “But what we can give her should give Nguyen enough of a direction that I’m not worried about those cops staying out of jail.”

  “Good,” Maria said flatly after a moment. “Did you track those cargo containers?”

  “We did,” Choi confirmed. “And now I have big ugly questions I don’t have answers to. Your Captain has a talent, you know that?”

  “For trouble?” Maria asked. “I’ve been figuring that. Where did it go?”

  “All of the cargo is heading for a company called Red Dragon Astrophysics,” the intelligence agent replied. “If it doesn’t sound like they need twenty million tons of rare earths and radioactives, I’ll note that RDA is the primary producer of particle accelerators and similar high-energy experimental systems in the MidWorlds.”

  “That doesn’t seem like something the MidWorlds would use much of,” Maria said.

  “Yeah, but across fifty-odd worlds, you’re looking at at least three or four major high-energy projects in a year,” Choi said. “That’s enough to consume a lot of these materials. And GDA has been needing a lot more raw materials of late.”

  Maria winced.

  “Why?” she asked carefully.

  “Their shipments, both in-system and out-system, have been seeing a rash of thefts,” the MISS Director told her. “What I find interesting is what one of my analysts just pointed out.”

  “Which is?”

  “The thefts over the last year or so add up to about forty million tons of components. With your shipment, the supplies they’ve received via BB&M add up to just under forty million tons of raw materials.

  “Given that Legatus is involved in those shipments, I’m not sure that is coincidence.”

  “No. Neither am I,” Maria admitted. “What do we know about these thefts?”

  Choi sighed.

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “Director?” Maria demanded.

  “We haven’t identified all of them, but the ones we have identified were all carried by Silent Ocean ships.

  “Silent Ocean is the organization Turquoise runs. Your contact, Mage Soprano, is more deeply involved in Legatan operations that our worst fears. We need to know what they’re doing.”

  “Damn.”

  Maria sighed, studying the panels of the ship around her.

  “I’ll talk to Rice,” she admitted. “But you realize I’m going to have to tell him everything, right? I can’t bring him in on this blind; he deserves better than that!”

  “Hand Stealey made it very clear, Mage Soprano, that you are in charge of this operation,” Choi told her. “As it happens, I agree with you—but it’s your call.”

  Maria exhaled again.

  “I’ll see what I can do. Thank you, Director.”

  33

  David returned to his ship with an unexaggerated sigh of relief. He hadn’t been worried, exactly, but given that he and his people had shot and killed multiple Anvil Station Police officers, there were all kinds of potential complications and problems that could have arisen in custody.

  Instead, they’d all been released. He had his suspicions as to why, but he wasn’t complaining about anything that got him back to Red Falcon.

  He was somewhat surprised, however, to exit the shuttle into the magical gravity of the shuttle bay to find only one person waiting for him. He’d half-expected to be met by at least all of the senior officers, but instead, only Maria Soprano was waiting for him.

  The dark-haired Mage was holding a perfect Navy-style salute as he exited the shuttle with Campbell and the two security people in trail, which he awkwardly returned. It might have been over twenty years since he’d been in the Navy, but muscle memory lasted a long time.

  “Captain, we need to talk,” she said instantly, before he could say a word.

  “I was hoping you could update me on my ship,” David said dryly.

  “I can do that. You, me, and Jenna in the Captain’s briefing room?” Maria replied crisply.

  He considered asking if he was allowed to take a shower in his own quarters first, but something in her stance and voice told him he didn’t want to wait. Plus, well, he wanted to know exactly what his ship’s status was.

  He was a starship captain first and foremost, and his starship was his baby.

  Plus, despite everything, he realized he trusted Soprano’s judgment, and if she said he needed to hear what she had to say, he needed to hear what she had to say.

  “Lead on, Ship’s Mage,” he replied. “Reyes, Nejem—you go crash. I’m sure Skavar will have one hell of a debrief for you, but tell him I sai
d you get a shower and eight hours in the rack first, clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What about me?” Campbell asked. “Do I get a shower and eight hours?”

  “Nah. You’re my second officer.” David grinned at her. “You get to join me in finding out just what Mage Soprano has done to my ship!”

  Entering his briefing room, David took a seat at the head of the table. Campbell followed suit, collapsing into a chair with the exhaustion of someone who’d had a really bad few days. David, at least, hadn’t been stunned—and she wasn’t fully recovered from having been shot a few weeks before.

  “How’s the ship?” he asked Maria without further preamble.

  “Coming together,” she told him. “If you want details, you’ll need to pin Kellers down, but I’ve got the high-level. Damage to the engines is repaired and our replacement engine is almost finished being fabricated. The lasers are remounted and the structural beams in the middle of the ship are repaired.

  “We’ve got about two days’ worth of work in the bow dome to get the radiation cap structure finished, sealed up and ready to go, and then we need to install the new antimatter drive unit.” She shrugged. “If I’m reading the reports correctly, we’re about four days away from being ready to go to space.

  “Our cargo is all off-loaded, we’ve been paid, and our deductible has been covered,” she concluded. “We probably don’t want to try and load cargo until we’re out of the yards, but we can probably start sourcing it.”

  “Good.” David rose, grabbed a glass of water from the sideboard and took a swallow. “I want to be the hell out of this system ASAP. The biggest cargo going the farthest away. I want fifty light-years between us and the Legacy.”

  Maria sighed and he made a checkmark in his mental list of bets while taking another drink of water.

  “And you’re about to try and argue me into making contact with this Turquoise,” he concluded. “And yes, I’m sure we could make some solid coin with another pseudo-smuggling job, and we’d probably get some intel that the Protectorate would love, but I need to remind you that we don’t work for the Protectorate.”