Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) (36 page)

Time passed. Every exchange burned more time until the
Blue Jay
could escape, but the destroyer continued to blaze towards them on a pillar of antimatter flame.

This time, when the transmission arrived, Okoro was clearly smiling.

“You may be correct, Captain, in that I cannot fire into your ship,” she said. “It is even possible, given the data I have from Corinthian, that you can escape. Understand this, Captain Rice. I may not be able track your jumps. I may not be able to chase you from star to star. The Hand can – and the Hand
will
.

“These are her orders from Mars. She will not fail. If you run, you will be run to ground. If you hide, you will be found. If you surrender now, you will be safe. You have my word, and the honor of his Majesty’s Navy on that.”

A chill of fear ran down David’s spine, and he met Damien’s eyes through the intercom video.

“No one can track a jump,” the Mage reminded him. “Hand or no Hand, she does not know where we’re going – and she
cannot
follow us.”

David suspected that the younger man was speaking as much to reassure himself as his Captain, but it made him feel better. He turned the recorder on and faced it one last time.

“I am sorry, Mage-Captain,” he said quietly. “But the fact remains that I can no longer trust the Protectorate. I will guard my crew from you with all that is in my power. By the time you receive this message, I will be less than an hour from leaving this system. You cannot catch us. You cannot pursue us.”

David Rice sat in his command chair for a long time after that, watching the Protectorate destroyer draw ever closer, until, finally, Damien wrapped him and his ship in a sphere of magic and whisked them away to safety.

#

“We found them.”

The words were quiet, but Alaura Stealey, Hand of the Mage-King of Mars, hadn’t missed the door to her private office opening. She heard Mage-Lieutenant Harmon, the executive officer of the destroyer
Tides of Justice
, perfectly clearly.

With a small sigh of satisfaction, she closed down the screen she was reviewing, filled with the latest in a series of reports from agents across the Protectorate. While the Mage-King’s instructions with regards to Montgomery had been clear, she couldn’t ignore the rest of her duties. There were too many trouble spots, here and there across the sphere of human space, which would eventually require the touch of a Hand.

“Who found them, and where?” she asked. There was no question as to who had been found.

“The destroyer
Golden Sword of Freedom
was making one of our irregular ‘you’re not building pirate ships, promise?’ stopovers in Amber. They detected the
Blue Jay
making a run for it. Mage-Captain Okoro challenged them, but Rice refused to surrender. The Mage at the transceiver provided a transcript of the conversation.”

Alaura nodded, quickly taking the sheet of hardcopy from the Navy officer and skimming through it. She grimaced at Rice’s words about trusting the Protectorate, and sighed aloud.

“I guess it was too much to hope that dropping all of the charges would get them to talk to us,” she said quietly. If only she could talk to them herself! The limitations of the use of transceiver arrays made that impossible unless she could actually convince the
Blue Jay
to stay somewhere until she arrived – and Rice had his opinion on that clear to Okoro.

“After Corinthian made it clear they intended to strip Montgomery’s magic, I’m not surprised,” she continued. “But, why Amber?”

Amber was a problem child for the Protectorate. While Alaura found herself somewhat in sympathy with the basic
philosophy
behind the planet, the fact that the world’s lax law enforcement tended to be abused by scum to do things like arm pirate ships gave her a headache.

“They were probably looking for a cargo, Ma’am,” Harmon told her. “From Amber, they’ll likely sweep out to the Fringe – carry cargos between worlds that see maybe three ships a year, and possibly three Protectorate ship a
decade
. They could make a lot of money, and avoid any attention from us.”

“Which will make tracking them almost impossible,” Alaura said aloud. She cursed, glancing around the tiny office. Her office gave her command of any resource the Protectorate had to offer, and she had runic tools most didn’t even think were
possible
, but even she couldn’t track a starship once it had jumped. There were rumors that some people had managed it, but if they had, the Navy had never worked out how.

“Someone on Amber has to know where they’re going, though, don’t they Ma’am?” Harmon asked.

“It’s not a certainty,” the Hand told him. “If they’re smart, they wouldn’t have trusted anyone on Heinlein Station as far as they could throw them.” She shrugged. “With that said, it’s our only lead.

“Send a message back through the Runic Transceiver Array,” she ordered. “Our agents on Amber are to try and track down who Captain Rice dealt with. Once you’ve transmitted that, get us underway. Time is of the essence if we are to find young Montgomery.”

“Understood Ma’am,” Harmon replied crisply. “I’ll inform the Captain, we should be able to break orbit within the hour.”

#

Mikhail Azure, leader of the Blue Star Syndicate, crime lord and master of the underworlds of a dozen systems, floated in zero-gravity in a perfect meditation pose. His eyes closed, he felt the world around him through the tiny twitches of energy and matter carried to him by his magic.

Through his magic he felt the pulsing energy of the
Azure Gauntlet
, his personal warship. Stolen from the Martian Navy years ago, she represented the ultimate iron fist of his organization. It had been some time since he had been aboard her, and the sense of sheer power the stolen cruiser represented was… calming.

The door to his private zero-gravity meditation room opening should have been a surprise – only one person on the ship would dare interrupt his meditation and only if it was important – and yet, he had known it was coming.

Azure would never claim to any man or woman that he could see the future. Neither magic nor science, for all their many gifts to mankind, had ever managed to peel back the veil of time. He often found, however, that he had flashes of insight into the future. He had known he would be interrupted this time, and it would be good news.

“Mister Wong,” he said softly, without opening his eyes. “What news?”

“The bounty hunter has found Rice’s ship,” the man who commanded the
Azure Gauntlet
for Mikhail told him calmly as he walked into the room. The scuff of the soft slippers Wong wore aboard the ship was loud in Azure’s ears, revealing the other man was using magic to keep his feet on the floor of the chamber.

“But has not captured him,” the crime lord said softly.

“They are at Amber, and he lacks the courage to challenge even that world’s lax defenses,” Wong replied.

“Do not be fooled by their single aged destroyer, Mister Wong,” Azure replied. “The Amber Defense Co-operative is a stronger force than they pretend– no lesser threat than your
Gauntlet
would suffice to overwhelm Amber.” He slowly rotated to face his servant, magic rotating his body without visible motion.

“Is Able prepared to pursue them?” he asked. He found Wong’s refusal to use the name of anyone who was not a senior member of the Syndicate or a worthy enemy a… tolerable foible, most of the time. Nonetheless, there were enough bounty hunters in the universe that names helped.

“Once he had access to the transceiver array, they had already fled the system before a Navy destroyer,” Wong told him.

“Able is a Tracker,” Azure said flatly. “He’s almost as good as you are.”

He felt Wong’s self-effacing half-bow, and snorted to himself. To his knowledge, fifteen men and women in all of human space had managed to master the trick of tracking a jump. For all that the jump itself was magic; the key to tracking it seemed to be technology – and an entirely intuitive art of reading the sensor readings of the jump.

Wong was the best at it, and it had made him utterly terrifying as Azure’s main enforcer for years. No enemy would evade him by running away in a jumpship. He claimed to be able to track where a ship had gone for days after it had left.

Able wasn’t that good. But he
could
track a jump and he’d been
in
the system when the
Jay
had left.

“They are shaping a course for the Excelsior system,” Wong said simply. “Able intends to ambush them in the asteroids there.”

Azure opened his eyes and lowered himself to the ground. He stretched, towering over the small form of the cruiser’s commander with the lanky height of those born and raised in low gravity, artificial environments.

“He will fail,” the leader of the Blue Star Syndicate said calmly.

“I agree,” Wong said simply.

“Able has underestimated Rice and Montgomery before – at Chrysanthemum,” Azure continued, ignoring his ship’s captain. “He will do so again, and I do not believe he will survive repeating the mistake.

“Make your course for Excelsior, Mister Wong. If I am wrong, then we will need to make Mr. Able an offer he cannot refuse.

“If I am right, we will have to clean up his mess.”

#

Stealey stalked through Heinlein station like a thunderstorm. The locals who didn’t get out of her way at the ominous cloud hovering over her head tended to clear out when they saw the golden hand icon of her station hanging around her neck.

The people who lived on Amber had little respect for authority, but what little they had tended to be for the Mage-King and his Hands. Stealey and her fellows had shed sweat, tears, and blood to prove themselves the champions of justice and compassion throughout the Protectorate – despite being the only men and women who could act as judge, jury and executioner.

Protectorate agents on Heinlein Station had identified the merchant Rice had dealt with before she arrived. Stealey knew Keiko Alabaster by reputation, and the woman should have known better.

Entering the office hidden away on the bottom floor of the gallery of Heinlein’s Quadrant Gamma, Stealey fixed an agate gaze on the young, mocha-skinned, woman sitting behind the reception desk.

“I need to speak with Miss Alabaster,” she said calmly. “Please inform her that Alaura Stealey is here to see her – she knows who I am.”

“Miss Alabaster is not in today.” The girl was both smart enough to at least not deny whose offices these were, and loyal enough to shield her boss.

Alaura sighed.

“Miss Jenna Alabaster,” she said calmly. “I am aware that your aunt entered this office at seven forty five Olympus Mons Time this morning. Despite this office having three separate concealed exits, she has not left since. Please tell her I am here.”

“It’s all right Jenna,” a voice interjected. “Though I would think a Hand would have better things to do than try to intimidate my staff.”

Alaura turned an assessing gaze on Keiko Alabaster, who returned the favor frankly. Where the merchant was tall and slim, Alaura was short and stocky. Where Alabaster was as pale as her name, the Hand was swarthy, her skin worn by years under the sun of space. Where Keiko was young and red-haired, Stealey was aged and graying.

Stealey sighed, nodding acceptance of the rebuke.

“I did not mean to intimidate anyone,” she said calmly. “I am in a hurry, however, and both lives and the security of the Protectorate are at stake.”

“I do not know what assistance I may be to a Hand of the Mage-King, but please, step into my office,” Keiko instructed.

Alaura followed the younger woman into her office. It was a surprisingly cramped space for the mistress of a billion-dollar trade empire. A massive desk filled much of the space, with a single holographic screen that Keiko closed with a wave of her hand as she sat behind the desk, gesturing the Hand to the single seat in front of the desk.

She had to move a stack of papers from the seat. If the dream of a paperless office had died anywhere, it was in Keiko Alabaster’s office. Every surface, from the desk to the bookshelves to the guest chair, was covered in paper. Alaura recognized many of the cover pages as belonging to finance and political think-tanks across the Protectorate. In that, at least, the office was what she expected of Keiko Alabaster.

“How may I assist the Protectorate, Lady Hand?” Keiko finally asked, her helpful words at odds with a body language that accentuated her height and position behind the desk.

“I need to know where you sent the
Blue Jay
,” Alaura said bluntly.

“I don’t believe I own or contract with a ship by that name,” the merchant princess replied. Her eyes were level and her voice didn’t waver – this woman was
good
, the Hand reflected.

Unfortunately for her, Alaura had done her research before she’d ever stepped into the office.