“You underestimate us,” the pirate replied. “But our job is to keep you alive. You were Navy, right?”
“Right.”
“We’ll assume escort formation Delta-Six,” Silent Atlantic informed him. “Try to not accidentally shoot any of us as we move in, eh?”
The thought was surprisingly tempting but, as the pirate had pointed out, they were allies today. Delta-Six had the three escort ships forming a triangle on a single plane around Red Falcon with one ship, presumably not Silent Atlantic since most of Falcon’s guns faced forward, in front.
They’d all be about thirty thousand kilometers apart. Knife range if anyone decided to open fire.
“We’ll be jumping in just under two hours,” David finally told them. “Will you be able to follow?”
“Aye. We’ll be with you the whole way, Falcon.”
David nodded and killed the channel, leaning back in his chair and glancing over at Campbell.
So, either the pirate ships each had at least three Mages aboard—far more than he’d expect pirates to be able to recruit…or they didn’t expect the trip to be nearly as long as David did.
It took most of the two hours for the pirate ships to match velocities at their intended locations, but then the four ships were left to drift gently through space.
The tension on Red Falcon’s bridge was thick enough to cut. Acconcio had done everything short of pulsing the pirate ships with active radar to lock them in for his weapons, and David was all too aware that Delta-Six put two thirds of their “allies” out of the line of fire of Falcon’s heavy lasers.
If he was lucky, their bridge crews were feeling just as twitchy as his. Red Falcon didn’t have much of a reputation yet, but she’d killed six Legacy corvettes so far—and David knew his reputation with the Blue Star Syndicate.
Much of the body count they’d racked up the previous year had been due to his Ship’s Mage, but since that part of the story was classified, he knew he was a personal bogeyman to many of the Syndicate’s survivors.
He couldn’t bring himself to be bothered by that.
“We’re ready to go, sir,” Soprano reported from the simulacrum chamber. “Course is laid in; we’re standing by to jump.”
“Send the course to them,” he ordered. “Give them a second or so to complete the jump, then follow them through.”
“Understood. Transmitting.”
A few seconds later, jump flares flickered on his screens, then Campbell flashed him a thumbs-up.
“Mage Soprano?”
Any response she made was lost in the eerie sensation of the teleport.
Despite his paranoia, the next jump point was clear. David’s estimate of how many Mages the pirates had was now at a minimum of two each, which was what he would have expected to be their maximum normally.
But no one from Silent Atlantic or the other ships raised a peep when they sent out the next jump path two hours later.
“Let them jump first again,” he told Soprano quietly. “They’re making me twitchy.”
“They knew how fast we moved,” she reminded him. “They would have made sure they could keep up.”
“That’s fair,” he agreed. “But I dislike that my escorts are pirate ships.”
“We don’t know they’re pirates for certain,” Soprano replied.
“No. But we can be pretty sure, can’t we?”
She didn’t argue the point.
“Jump initiation in twenty seconds,” she reported instead. “We’ll let them lead and then be on our way.”
The jump tore through David in its usual ripple of discomfort, and he sighed.
“Report,” he ordered as his guts tried to settle.
“We’re alone,” Acconcio said instantly. “What the hell? Our escorts are MIA; there’s no one else here.”
“Maria?” he asked. “Please tell me we got our jump wrong somehow.”
“No,” she said calmly, exhaustion layering her voice. “Nav suite says we’re eleven hundred kilometers from the target point. We’re bang on.”
“And our ‘friends’ are missing.” David sighed. “Acconcio, full active sensor sweep. Take the ship to battle stations.”
“It could be nothing,” the gunner noted.
“It could be,” David agreed. “But I’m not taking that bet. Battle stations, everyone.”
He looked at the exhausted image of his Ship’s Mage.
“Go rest, Maria,” he ordered. “There’s nothing close to us; we’ll wake you up if there’s trouble.”
“Don’t forget,” she told him. “You may still need me.”
“I won’t. Go.”
He waited long enough for Xi Wu to relieve Soprano, taking over the station in the simulacrum chamber, and then pinged Skavar.
“Chief?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Get your men and women in their exosuits,” David ordered. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I want your people standing by to repel boarders.”
“We were born ready,” Skavar replied. “We’ll be in our suits in three minutes.”
“Good.”
David studied the imposingly blank hologram in the center of his bridge. Something was wrong. If it was a trap, he’d have expected it to be sprung already.
What was he missing?
37
Seconds ticked by. Slowly, painfully slowly, they turned to minutes. The emptiness of the void was making David even twitchier, but it also meant his ship was safe. For now.
“There they are!” Acconcio suddenly snapped. “They missed their jump, I’ve got three jump flares at fifteen light-minutes at exactly the time I’d expect.”
Fifteen light-minutes on a one-light-year jump wasn’t that bad when you thought about it, but it was enough to throw any kind of escort or formation completely out of whack.
“Are we sure it’s them?” he asked. If someone knew their course plot—and it was supposed to have been leaked this time—faking being their escort would be an effective way to sneak up on them in plain sight.
“Incoming transmission,” Campbell reported. “They must have pulsed it toward our expected emergence just after they jumped.”
“Play it.”
The same distorted ocean scene appeared on the screen.
“Red Falcon, this is Silent Atlantic.” The speaker didn’t sound particularly happy. “I’m pretty sure you sent us the right coordinates, but they got glitched out in our systems. All of our systems.
“I don’t need to tell you that’s unlikely. We’re en route to your expected emergence, but our ETA sucks and there is no way we can jump in less than two hours. We’ll plan to rendezvous at the next jump, but…watch your ass, Captain Rice. From a quarter-billion kilometers away, I sure as hell can’t.”
“Send an acknowledgement,” he ordered. “Keep us at maximum alert. Acconcio, anything on that sensor sweep?”
“Nothing,” the gunner replied, leaning against his console in a half-exhausted slump. “We’re clear for twenty light-seconds in every direction, at least. That’s as far as the active sweep is going to get us.”
He shrugged.
“Beyond that, passives are clear except for the Silent Ocean ships. No thermal signatures. No EM radiation, nothing. It’s dead as the graveyard out there.”
David nodded slowly. It didn’t feel right, but he couldn’t keep his crew at top readiness forever. He trusted the scanners enough to relax a bit—unless someone jumped in right on top of them, which would require more information than he’d left behind in Svarog, they’d have plenty of warning when the other shoe dropped.
“All right, stand us down to alert two,” he ordered. “All of you”—he glanced around his bridge—“switch off for your backups and go get some rest. You’ve been going since we left Svarog, and if we’re going to get intercepted on the next jump, I want you all with at least a nap under your belts.
“Go.”
“What about you?” Campbell asked, staying at her console.
“I’m the Captain,” he told her. “Holding the watch while I send everyone else to rest is my prerogative.”
She looked ready to argue, but he shook his head at her and she finally, slowly, nodded.
Campbell rose, joining Acconcio and the others in trooping off the bridge, leaving David behind with his backup crew.
His nerves said he should keep them, but logic said they were clear—and he’d need them rested when they weren’t clear anymore!
Maria wasn’t sure how long she’d been asleep—it couldn’t have been more than fifteen, maybe twenty minutes—before the admittance buzzer on her quarters went off.
The Captain had an emergency link to her wrist-comp. Everybody else should have known better than to harass a Jump Mage right after jumping. She hadn’t even taken the time to undress before falling into her bed—though given the circumstances, she’d probably have stayed in her shipsuit with its emergency pressurization and oxygen-supply capabilities anyway.
She ignored the buzzer and tried to go back to sleep—only for it to, unsurprisingly, sound again.
And again.
Grumbling, she got up and crossed to her door. She even managed to suppress the ball of probably non-lethal lightning she conjured on the way. Waking her up wasn’t really punishable, much as she’d like to hurt whoever had done it.
That urge accelerated when she saw that it was Acconcio standing at her door. He didn’t try and come into her room at least, he just stood there, looking even worse than he had on the bridge. His eyes were bloodshot and he looked completely exhausted.
“What the hell is this, Officer Acconcio?” she demanded carefully.
“I was thinking about what you said,” he half-slurred. Was he drunk? “About…men and second chances.”
“Then you damn well have a good reason to be at my door,” Maria pointed out dryly.
To her surprise, he shook his head.
“Ain’t about us,” he told her. “I fucked up, your call, your choice, ain’t gonna argue. But I already gots a second chance, see? A second chance to go to space. A second chance to fly.”
His words were swinging from coherent to slurred at random, and what he was saying didn’t make sense.
“Iovis,” she said gently. “You probably need to go lie down. You’re drunk and you’re exhausted. Whatever you want to say we can talk about another time.”
“No!” he snapped. “Can’t. I fucked it up, Maria. I fucked all of it up.”
His second chance was aboard Red Falcon, she realized. If he’d fucked that up… her blood ran cold.
“I sold us out,” he admitted. “They said they wouldn’t hurt you, that I’d get the ship, make it easy so long as the Captain died. Weren’t supposed to jump us in space, were just supposed to kill the engines. They lied, told me it was a mistake.
“But it weren’t, were it?” He was staring at her, desperately looking for something even as Maria drew back from him.
She was preparing another self-defense spell. She’d shock him, take him into custody, get him to repeat what he was saying to the Captain. It would give them some of their answers.
“Tried to get you out of the way at Madagascah,” he slurred. “Needed their money but didn’t want you to get hurt. Kept going wrong. Fucked it all up. Again. And again.”
Now he was crying and Maria wasn’t quite sure what to do anymore. She was half-tempted to hug him and half-tempted to shock him unconscious.
“You rigged the rear turrets,” she said, stretching for some kind of logic.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “They gave me the code, more than I could put together, but I checked it to be sure it was what they said it was. It was money, Maria, always just money…and they said you’d be safe.”
“We can still fix this,” she told him. “We can change courses, run, hide. Whatever you sold them, we can make it right.”
“No, we can’t,” he gasped out past choking sobs. “I fucked it all up, Maria. The ships aren’t the—”
Bullets ricocheted off Maria’s door, several slamming into her bedroom and one searing a fiery line across her shoulder—but all of them went through the big ex-Navy man standing in front of her.
Iovis Acconcio’s blood sprayed across her and the big man fell to his knees, blood filling his mouth as he tried to speak, tried to finish his warning.
Then he collapsed forward, revealing the slim, pale-skinned form of Shachar Costa standing behind him—with the ugly form of the MAC-6 pistol in his hand now pointed directly at Maria.
“Drunk and in love, damn, what an idiot,” Costa said calmly. “I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I told you he was a traitor to the ship and that’s why I shot him?”
Maria had already conjured a shield of force between her and her erstwhile subordinate.
“Not really, no.”
“Didn’t think so.”
The gun fired again, bullets smashing into the shield with bone-shattering force. The shield held and Costa shrugged.
“Didn’t think that would work,” he admitted. Almost casually, he holstered the gun and grinned at her. “Well, ‘boss’? Got a plan? A backup spell? Some grand magical trick the Navy taught you that us poor weak civvies couldn’t match?”
She’d just jumped. She was exhausted—it was all she could do to keep the shield up. Her lack of response seemed to embolden Costa and he gestured, conjuring a blast of lightning that hammered her defenses, forcing her to step back from Acconcio’s body into her room.
“You’re crazy,” she gasped out. “Every alarm on the ship has to have gone off by now!”
“That, Mage Soprano, would require the internal sensors to be working,” the younger Mage told her, a second hammer of lightning flickering across Maria’s shield. “And believe me, I am quite certain they aren’t.”
“What have you done?”
“Oh, it’s quite the list and we don’t have time for it,” he replied. “I’d love to test those Navy-trained skills of yours, but I had such a better plan. Iovis fucked it up by opening your door—but hey! He isn’t a problem anymore.
“Night-night, ‘boss.’”
Costa didn’t do anything visible, but the door to Maria’s quarters slammed shut between them. Acconcio’s outstretched arm had been in the track of the door, but the heavy security shutter severed it with a heart-wrenching snap.
She stared at her door for several long seconds, then slammed the open button. She wasn’t surprised when it refused to listen to her.
Then she tried to raise the bridge. Her wrist-comp informed her that it was not longer connected to the ship’s internal network. Two attempts to send direct transmissions confirmed her worst fears.
She was being jammed. Costa had taken control of the ship’s internal systems, blinding Captain Rice to any internal threat.
What kind of threat would require that? They were expecting an attack from outside, but unless Costa had help, he couldn’t take the ship on his own…
Except they’d loaded fourteen million tons of cargo. Fourteen hundred ten-thousand-ton containers. They’d scanned the secondary loads carefully, though. So, if there were infiltrators, they’d either had some top-of-the-line concealment gear or…
Or Turquoise had betrayed them from the beginning, and every piece of this was another jaw of the trap.
She made it as far as the access panel for the manual override before she started to find herself short of breath and realized the problem. Costa didn’t just have control of the sensors. The bastard had at least partial control of the life support systems—and he’d stopped oxygen circulating into her room.
Maria wove a spell around herself quickly, almost unconsciously, and then slumped against the wall. Just keeping herself alive was going to take everything she had. She forced herself to grab the panel and try to pull it open, but the unused machinery resisted her.
Her fingers slipped free and she collapsed to the floor, relying on her purification spell as she gasped for br
eath.
This…was not going well.
38
The sensors were still quiet. The single trio of Silent Ocean ships continued to progress toward Red Falcon as the big ship floated through space, and nothing else, threatening or otherwise, marked David’s displays.
Somehow, that was only making him more nervous. He checked all of the scans himself, to be sure. Nothing.
Everything across the ship was green and calm, but the hairs on the back of his neck kept itching.
“James, how’s everything in Engineering?” he asked Kellers. His chief engineer appeared on the screen, leaning back in his own chair and supervising affairs in his cavernous domain.
“Sleepy,” the engineer told him. “Like the calm before the storm.”
David laughed humorlessly. His engineer had the nerves as well.
“Anything we need to be keeping an eye on?”
“Engines are green. Guns are green. Missiles are green.” Kellers shook his head. “Everything looks right.”
“But the hairs on the back of your neck are standing up, huh?”
“You too?”
“Yeah.” David considered. “Indulge my paranoia, James. Check that arms locker we didn’t tell anyone we’d installed, and be ready to arm your people.”
“You’re expecting boarders?”
“I don’t know what I’m expecting. It’s just too quiet, and I can’t shake the feeling that the mis-jump wasn’t an accident. And if it wasn’t…there should be something going down.”
“Warn Xi Wu and Skavar,” Kellers suggested. “I’ll keep Engineering in hand.” He paused. “Want me to scrub the sensor data? Make sure we don’t have any unexpected viruses in the processing centers?”
David shivered.
“Is that possible?” he asked.
“It isn’t easy, but given what someone did to our rear turrets…”
“Scrub the data,” David ordered. “If our eyes have been blinded, let me know.”
Nodding, Kellers turned away, dropping the line.
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