“You have the standard Marine portable med-suite, don’t you?” she asked.
He caught what she meant and started shaking his head.
“It has three doses of Exalt in it,” she told him. “Get them for me.”
“No,” Skavar snapped. “I will not let you poison yourself with that shit.”
“Chief Skavar,” Maria said grimly, “whether we’re going by Red Falcon’s chain of command or the Protectorate’s, you answer to me. Get me the damn Exalt.”
Exalt was a mix of drugs and thaumaturgically modified chemicals designed for exactly her current condition. The primary ingredient was a powerful amphetamine, and even the Mages who’d put it together weren’t sure why some of the other ingredients worked as they did.
Each dose would give her roughly an hour of full strength. Then the come-down would suck.
If she took three, the final come-down would probably kill her.
40
An hour. It had only been an hour since Red Falcon had jumped into this godforsaken piece of interstellar wasteland.
David’s scanners still showed that the space around Falcon was clear, but given that his computers also told him that his ship was fully in the green, functional and not infested with hostiles, he wasn’t sure he trusted them.
“They’re still closing,” Cohen noted. “No further communication from Silent Atlantic, but all three ships are on their way.”
“That would be more reassuring if I was certain they were on our side,” David told the chief. “Rogers. How’s the guns?”
“They seem to be responding so far,” Acconcio’s deputy replied. “LaMonte? Does it look like I’m being fed bullshit?”
“Not yet,” the engineer replied. “You’re about to lose everything for seventy seconds, though—I’m resetting the weapons firmware to factory settings.”
She glanced over at David.
“I figured we wanted guns before anything else,” she said apologetically.
“Go for it,” he ordered. “But I’d love internal sensors.”
“Someone’s coming,” one of the support techs said from the door. The young woman had grabbed one of the carbines and was standing guard. David had minimal faith in her ability to hit anything with the gun, but he couldn’t fault her enthusiasm.
Or her intelligence. She’d linked the carbine’s gun-cam to her wrist-comp and was watching around the corner with the barrel instead of exposing herself.
“That’s not right,” she murmured. “Boss, I got three black-as-night exosuits heading our way. Weren’t ours…”
“Gray,” David said quietly. “Gray with the ship crest. Show me.”
Internal sensors and cameras showed the corridor as completely empty, but the gun-cam told him everything he needed to know. Three exosuited troopers carrying heavy auto-shotguns were advancing down the hallway.
The exosuits were the wrong color and the guns weren’t a weapon Skavar’s men had in their stockpile.
“We’ve been boarded,” he told his people. He’d been pretty sure before, but seeing it confirmed was still heart-wrenching. “Cohen?”
“Boss?”
“The carbines won’t do crap against exosuits, but there’s a couple of black cylinders in the arms locker. About forty-five centimeters long, with clips on top?”
“Found them.”
“Bring them to me.”
Cohen handed David the first of the under-barrel weapons, looking at the one he still held like it was a venomous snake.
“Do I want to know what I’m holding?” he asked.
“No.”
David locked the single-shot tube onto his own carbine, linking the gun-cam up with his own PC and activating a secondary program in the gun’s systems.
Then he stepped around the half-closed hatch, lined up the carbine and pressed the trigger on the under-barrel tube. The gun nearly kicked itself out of his hands with recoil as the over-compressed chemical charge lit off, barely managing to not disintegrate the tube as it fired its single massive projectile.
The sabot was discarded before the round had traveled two meters, stabilizing fins popping out as a secondary rocket ignited, adding even more velocity to the penetrator rocket.
It slammed into the chest of the lead exosuit, punched clean through the first layer of armor, and then detonated inside the man’s chest.
The suit of armor just…stopped, frozen in place as it held its occupant’s corpse upright.
David dodged back into the bridge as a hail of return fire echoed down the corridor.
“Next,” he ordered grimly. “Give me a distance?”
“Ten meters and closing,” the tech told him. “There’s no time.”
“There’s just enough time,” David replied. He clamped the second disposable penetrator onto his carbine and repeated the stunt.
This time, the attackers were waiting for him, and flechettes ricocheted off the walls around him. Even as several of them tore into him, he resisted the pain long enough to aim carefully before firing the second rocket.
He didn’t wait to see if he’d hit. He let himself fall through the door and raised his voice so Falcon’s computers could hear him.
“Bridge lockdown alpha,” he snapped. “Voice authenticate. Seal now.”
It was easy to forget that Red Falcon had been built as a military ship. So much of her design and functionality—outside of her weapons and engines, at least—was shaped by her core identity as a freighter. One easily ended up thinking of her as a freighter with guns bolted on.
She was no such thing.
At David’s verbal command, thick blast shutters, rated to withstand a point-blank nuclear explosion, slammed shut over the exterior of the bridge access. Secondary accesses for maintenance had smaller but equally tough shutters close over them. A miniature isolated life-support system came online.
“Damn it, sir, you’ve been shot!” Cohen barked. “Medkit!”
David let his people urge him back to his chair, but shook his head.
“Just a flesh wound,” he told them. “Bandage it; I’ll be fine. LaMonte!”
“Sir?”
“Progress?” he demanded, wincing as Cohen went at his injuries with rough-and-ready first aid.
“Weapons systems are all reset, rekeyed and secured,” she promised. “Short of physically taking control of the weapons stations away from the on-mount crews, there’s no way they can stop us engaging.”
“Good. Sensors?”
“Still working on it.” She glanced back at her screen and visibly winced. “Damn. We just lost external sensors. I’ve got the targeting arrays on the weapon mounts, but the main sensors are now feeding into the same damn black box that’s eating our internal scans.”
“What’s the box showing us?” David asked, then hissed as the antiseptic spray went into his wounds.
“Just the three Silent Ocean ships closing, same pace as before,” she told him. “The targeting arrays aren’t as clear, but…”
“But?” he asked after she trailed off.
“There are at least two more clusters of signatures now,” LaMonte reported. “Not sure of range, probably still around eight to ten million klicks. Well outside of fusion missile range but in range of our antimatter birds.”
“Without the main arrays, we’re firing half-blind at that range,” David pointed out. “We don’t know who’s out there.”
It had been eighty minutes since jump. There was no way these were friendlies.
The Legacy had arrived.
“At that range, they aren’t a threat yet,” he admitted. “Get me internal sensors first, Kelly—and then get me the scanners I need to shoot those bastards down.”
41
Exalt glowed.
It also moved on its own. It was hard to see that in the vial, as Exalt was a clear, transparent liquid, but the glowing made it possible to see the unending wave in the liquid in the prepackaged hypodermic.
The combat drug was pro
bably the creepiest technically inanimate thing Maria had ever seen, but she’d been injected with it before. Once.
Exalt didn’t make a Mage more powerful. It simply “borrowed” energy from your future self, giving you a short-term surge of power and strength in trade for long-term hell.
“Are you sure about this?” Skavar asked after one of his people had passed Maria the case with the three glowing syringes. “All I really know about this stuff is that I’m—roughly—better off shooting myself than injecting it.”
“Assuming you shot yourself competently, it would be a far less painful way to die as a mundane, yes,” she agreed, selecting one of the syringes at random. Exalt interacted directly with a Mage’s power. There was no counteragent. It was a deadly poison in a non-Mage.
“That said, I’ve used it before and I know what I’m doing,” she assured the security chief. “And you need me.”
“That’s true enough,” he admitted. “But…”
“We can’t make contact with the bridge or engineering,” Maria reminded him. “We’re starting to run into hostiles every way we go. We know we’ve lost the simulacrum chamber, which means we can’t jump.”
Before she could argue with him more—or let the soft voice in the back of her mind talk her out of what she knew was actually a really bad idea—she bent her head back and slammed the syringe into her carotid artery.
That hurt. A lot. As the auto-injector fed the drug into her system, though, the pain eased. Her exhaustion went with it and new energy filled her. She smiled grimly as she withdrew the needle, laying the empty syringe down in the case and gently placing a patch over the tiny wound on her throat.
The drug didn’t give her enough energy to, say, jump the ship, but it put her back in fighting trim and meant she wouldn’t need to be carried through the ship.
“All right,” she breathed. “Do we have a team for the pushback?”
“We do,” Skavar confirmed. “I’m coming with you too, leaving Reyes in charge here.” He paused, visibly swallowing as he picked his helmet up.
“Antonov got back to me,” he told her gently. “Anders was sealed in his quarters and the airflow cut off. He wasn’t wearing a shipsuit.” He shook his head. “He didn’t make it.”
“Damn.” She shook her head. “Let’s get moving. I’ve definitely lost one Mage today, and I plan to make it at least two before this mess is over.”
“Only if you get to Costa first,” Skavar said flatly. “Otherwise, I don’t plan on leaving enough of him for you to identify, let alone kill.”
Eighteen exosuited security troopers, three armed pilots and one angry Mage stormed their way back along the central stem of Red Falcon’s hull. The rest of Skavar’s people were sweeping the gravity decks and pushing toward the bridge.
“Are we going to able to relieve the bridge?” Maria asked him softly.
In response, Skavar finally put on his helmet and was silent for several seconds.
“I don’t know,” he murmured, his speakers pitched so only she could hear him. “Rice has probably gone into lockdown, which means the bastards are stuck between an anvil and a hammer, but they quite likely have more people than I do.
“It could get ugly,” he admitted. “But I’m as worried about the next step as anything else.”
She nodded.
“Ships.”
“Exactly. We need to be able to run,” Skavar told her. “Which is up to you.”
“If Wu is dead, we’re still fucked,” Maria warned him. “Taking Exalt means I can fight, but it fucks me for jumping for at least twenty hours.”
“I know.”
She shook her head, continuing to follow the exosuits down the corridor.
“What happens if this all goes to shit?” she asked conversationally.
“Then we fall back on what Marines hope to never do,” he told her. “We pray the Navy gets here in time.”
Maria was surprised by how far they made it along the ship’s core before they ran into any resistance at all. According to her mental map, they’d almost made it to the simulacrum chamber before gunfire started to echo down the hallway ahead of them.
“Report,” Skavar barked, then paused to listen.
“You need to stay back here,” he ordered Maria a moment later. “Someone was expecting us, sooner or later, and they’ve set up barricades and dug in. They don’t have much in terms of anti-exosuit gear, but those big auto-shotguns will be hell on those of you without suits.”
“How many?” she asked calmly.
“Maria…”
“That’s Mage Soprano,” she snapped. “And I asked how many, Chief.”
He sighed.
“Two portable heavy barricades, half a dozen men in exosuits, at least four mounted heavy weapons,” he reeled off. “The exosuits are carrying anti-personnel guns, but those heavy weapons can take down my men. We need to move up carefully, control the situation.”
“We don’t have time,” Maria reminded him, biting off her words carefully and testing the warm buzz of the Exalt in her blood. “Keep them distracted.”
“Distracted?” Skavar said. “What are you going to do?”
“My job.”
Leaving the security chief behind her, she charged forward, letting the Exalt fill her limbs with energy as she drew on her power. She didn’t make it far before she reached the forward position, Red Falcon’s people using a half-closed hatch as cover while they tried to take out the heavy weapons.
“We’re your covering fire, ma’am,” Nejem’s familiar voice said from inside one of the suits of armor. “What’s the plan?”
“You keep them distracted. I kill them.”
“Oorah,” Nejem said after a moment of silence. “All people, we have Mage support now. Target those heavy weapons; keep the bastards’ heads down!”
She gave him a firm nod.
“Good luck.”
She didn’t respond, channeling magic around her to create her own personal gravity field. It was easier in the magical gravity of Red Falcon’s interior than it would have been on a planet—if nothing else, she knew the gravity spells on her ship inside and out now.
Maria leapt delicately into the air as the troopers opened fire. Her magic wrapped around her, sending her plunging feet first toward the barricade. She made it well over halfway across the impromptu no man’s land before the boarders saw her coming.
They were smart, though. The moment they saw her, they changed the focus of their fire, and streams of high-speed bullets from the tripod-mounted penetrator rifles slammed into the shield she’d conjured in front of her.
It wouldn’t hold forever, but it held for long enough for her to reach the position and land on the opposite side of the barricade—and drain the power from the gravity runes beneath her feet.
One moment, they didn’t need to secure themselves. Tripods and exosuits alike were braced against the floor but not locked onto it with magnets or the other zero-gravity tools built into the systems.
The next, recoil scattered the entire position as the gravity went away. One of the mounted penetrator rifle crews walked their fire across one of their armored friends, ripping him in half despite the suit.
For a handful of seconds, the entire defensive position was chaos. That might have been enough for Skavar’s totally-not-Marines to sweep the barricade, but Maria Soprano wanted her damn ship back.
The boarders spun away from her uncontrollably but not unpredictably. Precisely aimed and calibrated blasts of fire flickered from her hands, burning through exosuit weak points and exposed flesh alike.
By the time Nejem’s team reached the barricade, she’d restored the gravity and was calmly waiting for them amidst the bodies.
“Let’s move,” she said briskly. “We need to take the simulacrum chamber. Wu may still be alive.”
She could be sick later. She was quite sure now that she would have been sick later even without the Exalt.
“I think that’s far enough
,” a mockingly familiar voice said a few seconds later as she tried to head down the corridor.
“I’m going to kill you, Costa,” Maria said conversationally. It appeared that the young Mage had more access to the sensors than they did, which made sense. Someone had to have hacked into Red Falcon’s systems, and she’d freely admit that most people, mundane and Mage alike, would assume a Mage didn’t have the technical skills.
“You want to kill me,” he corrected over the speakers. “But if you and your armored friends keep coming down that hallway, who you’re going to kill is poor little Xi Wu. She’s a dear, a pretty little thing who never harmed anyone, and I’d rather not put a bullet in her brainpan, but if you don’t stop right there, I will.”
Maria slowed.
“You know if you hurt her, there isn’t a hole in the galaxy deep enough to save you,” she said conversationally.
“Stop, Mage Soprano. Not slow,” he snapped. “And you already want to kill me. What difference would blowing Wu’s brains out make to that?”
He chuckled grimly.
“Besides, if hurting her was the line, I’m already fucked, aren’t I?” he pointed out.
“You know the game’s already over,” Maria said. “We’re retaking this ship and you can’t stop us at this point.”
“That’s…sixty-forty,” Costa said. “Our favor. And that’s assuming my friends outside don’t get too involved. And since I’m sitting on the simulacrum, I can make sure any friends you’d arranged to show up can’t catch us.
“So, I agree, the game is over—but not in your favor. Legacy’s only after Rice, though,” he pointed out. “I can make a deal if you want to play.”
“You’re Legacy?” Maria demanded.
“I’m as much Legacy as you’re MISS,” he replied. “More, arguably, since I was part before I joined this ship, where you were a convenience to them. Whatever you think Rice is worth, you’re lowballing it. You want Falcon itself? I can arrange that. Money? I can make every member of this crew who yields rich beyond their wildest dreams.”
Interstellar Mage Page 28
