Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) (40 page)

To be fair, if the hunter was going up against a Martian destroyer, he was utterly out-gunned and out-massed to begin with. The ship was clearly built to hunt ordinary pirate ships – similar in hull type to the bounty hunter vessel, but with weaker engines and inferior weapons.

“Does he see us?” Kelly asked.

“Not yet,” Jenna told her. “He will, though.”

A blinking green sphere appeared on the screen – the target zone that the bounty hunter
had
to move through for Kelly’s plan to work.

“Come on,” David muttered. “You know we’re here, and you know where we’d have emerged. Come into my parlor.”

“I’m not feeling overly spider-esque here boss,” Jenna told him with a laugh. “Here he comes!”

The hunter’s ship had lit off its antimatter drives, heading in the
Blue Jay
’s direction. It was impossible to tell if he was simply heading for the logical point, or had picked up residual heat on the
Jay
’s hull. The lack of weapons fire did suggest the former, but they would only know if he’d missed them if he passed the two million kilometer mark.

In none of their previous encounters had the ship come that close – the bounty hunter clearly knew a
lot
about amplifiers.

“Come on, come on,” Kelly said quietly, echoing David’s words of a moment earlier. The bounty hunter was headed directly for the center of her sphere. Her hands were flying over her console, setting up adjustments and fallback plans.

“Shit! He’s gone active!” Jenna snapped. A blinking alert noted that the bounty hunter had fired off a high energy radar pulse, sweeping the area around him. “He’s got us – and the tanker!”

Floating in deep space, most of the way towards the bounty hunter’s ship was the in-system fuelling tanker they’d stolen from Chrysanthemum. It was abandoned with no crew, running on a simple program fed into the Artificial Sequential Intelligence they’d loaded into its computers.

“Let’s give him a target,” David ordered. “Kellers, fire up the heat exchangers and give me engines. It’s time to play bait.”

“He’s got to see it,” Kelly said quietly.

“It’s not whether he
sees
it that matters,” David told her. “It’s if he
understands
– so let’s make him think we ditched it to save mass.”

Seconds later, the
Blue Jay
’s mighty engines flared to life. On the link to the simulacrum Chamber, Damien cried out in pain as the acceleration drove his broken leg into the platform, but shook his head sharply when everyone on the bridge looked to him.

“
Look
,” he snapped, gesturing to the main screen.

Despite detecting the tanker, the hunter had ignored it – driving directly towards the
Jay
and increased its acceleration. He was in the green sphere now, drawing closer to its center as his speed increase.

“Make the call, Kelly,” David told her. The engineer had done the math, programmed the intelligence. She had the numbers on her console to know when to activate her program.

The hunter was only a thousand kilometers away from the tanker when the young woman hit the command. It grew closer as the message flew across the light seconds.

Then the tankers oversized engines, designed to carry a heavy load of super-dense compressed hydrogen, flared to life at full power – throwing the half empty spacecraft through space at almost fifteen gravities.

The bounty hunter had less than ten seconds to react, and their engines had only just started to flare sideways, trying desperately to change their course, when a quarter million tons of starship and fuel slammed into them at over a hundred kilometers a second.

The fireball when the hunter ship’s antimatter met the tanker’s fuel tanks rivaled a small sun.

#

Azure had heard that most humans who looked at the Graveyard found it depressing – a warning sign of the fate that humanity might share. Staring at the ancient alien station from the bridge of the
Azure Gauntlet
, however, he saw something different. He saw a fate that could
never
befall humanity – thanks to Mages like him and those who had come before him, a single cosmic accident like the one that had befallen Excelsior could not destroy humanity.

Most humans, he reflected, were not nearly appreciative enough for all that Mages did for them.

Behind where the crime-lord stood, his hands crossed behind his back, Wong’s bridge bustled as the cruiser’s crew pulled together the many tiny pieces of data their commander needed to establish his course.

“Well, Mr. Wong?” he asked after examining Graveyard Station for a few minutes. “What do you have?”

“There was a battle,” Wong said calmly. “Your hunter tried to ambush the
Blue Jay
with small craft of some kind. They failed, destroyed by the amplifier. He then tried a direct missile attack, but was intercepted by Navy-grade anti-missile munitions fired by a third vessel. The
Blue Jay
fled. So did your hunter. The Navy ship disappeared as well.”

“So Able failed. I am not entirely surprised.”

Wong shrugged. “The hunter is aware of the consequences of failure at this point,” he pointed out delicately. “I imagine he followed the
Jay
further.”

Azure made a throw-away gesture with one hand, his gaze returned to the ominous bulk of Graveyard Station.

“At this point, it no longer matters,” he told Wong. “Can you track Rice’s ship?”

“I’ll need some more time,” the tracker answered. “Twenty minutes or so.”

“Take thirty,” the crime lord ordered. “We cannot afford to fail when we are this close – I
must
have either that ship or Montgomery. We will do whatever is necessary to achieve this; do you understand me Mister Wong?”

There was a long silence behind him, and then he felt the ship captain bow.

“I understand completely, Lord Azure.”

#

The stolen cruiser orbited the Lagrange point for another forty minutes, and then vanished in the energy burst of a jump.

Alaura Stealey, Hand of the Mage-King of Mars, watched it for the entire time it was in the Excelsior system. The
Tides of Justice
had arrived barely twenty minutes before the unidentified ship, and they’d gone completely dark the moment she’d realized the cruiser wasn’t flying a Navy beacon – apparently, quickly enough they’d gone unnoticed.

“She’s a
Minotaur
class armored cruiser, ma’am,” Mage-Lieutenant Harmon told her. She’d joined him and the ship’s Captain on the bridge for this approach, hoping they would find the
Blue Jay
in Excelsior. “Her hull number’s been scrubbed, but we’re running her drive harmonics now. We
may
be able to identify her if they haven’t changed the engines too much.”

“Lieutenant, ‘
Minotaur
class’ doesn’t mean much to me,” the Hand admitted. “Details?”

“An older class of cruisers,” he explained. “First built forty years ago, there are twelve left in the Navy but most have been retired and broken up for scrap.”

“But not this one.”

“I presume, Lady Hand,” Mage-Captain Judy Barnett interjected calmly, “that this one is listed as having been scrapped. That’s why I want to identify her if at all possible. We need to understand how one of our cruisers ended up in the hands of pirates.”

“It appears that the Blue Star Syndicate may be more dangerous than we feared,” Alaura agreed.

“How do you know it’s the Blue Star?” Barnett asked. The Mage-Captain had never quite seemed reconciled to being a glorified chauffeur to the Hand, but the sudden appearance of a rogue Navy cruiser had brought about quite the transformation.

“The Blue Star Syndicate has been pursuing Captain Rice for some years,” Alaura explained. “No other organization would be willing to commit such a vessel, if they had one, to such a wild goose chase.”

“Ma’ams!” one of the sensor techs suddenly interrupted. “There’s another ship in the cluster.”

“Where?” Barnett demanded. “Show me.”

The sensor tech highlighted a region of the asteroid cluster, almost half-way across the clump of rocks from where the pirate cruiser had been.

“She’s hiding hard, tucked up right next to an asteroid the inhabitants of Graveyard had mined out,” the tech reported. “Without our sensor upgrades, we’d have missed her completely!”

The
Tides of Justice
, Alaura reflected, was the newest and most advanced destroyer the Navy had. She remembered something in her briefing on the ship about her being equipped with the latest breakthroughs in sensors and scanners from Legatus – something to do with magnetic field resolutions.

“Hail her,” she instructed sharply. Barnett threw her a cross look, but the Captain held her tongue.

“Recording now,” a communications tech told her, and Alaura faced the recorders.

“Unidentified vessel, this is Alaura Stealey, Hand of the Mage-King of Mars,” she said sharply. “Please identify yourself and explain your business in a quarantine zone.”

There was no response for a moment, and then the tech threw a video channel on screen. A young handsome man in a deep red shirt faced the camera with a twisted smile on his face.

“Lady Hand,” he greeted her. “I am Captain Nathan Seule of the
Luciole
. You are known to me by reputation, and I assure you that I am simply passing through.”

Seule. Of all the ships and all the captains to show up here, it had to be Nathan Seule.

“You are known to me as well,” she said bluntly. What rebellions in the Fringe that Stealey had dealt with that
hadn’t
involved Keiko Alabaster had involved Nathan Seule – and many had involved both. “But honestly, today I don’t care if you were shipping guns or native art – did you see what happened here?”

The smuggler was hesitant for a long moment, and then nodded sharply.

“I don’t normally aim to co-operate with the Protectorate, begging your pardon ma’am,” he said quietly. “But jes’ this once, I think I can make an exception. I met another ship here for a cargo transfer, but then we got jumped by a bounty hunter. We drove them off, but I figured here was as safe a place as any to fix up the scratching they gave my paint job… and then, well, that cruiser shows up a day later.”

“A day ago,” Stealey said calmly. “Was the ship you met the
Blue Jay
under Captain Rice?”

She could almost watch Seule’s desire to help Rice war with his desire to keep secrets, until the Captain sighed again.

“A man doesn’t have a choice when faced with this, does he?” he asked her.

“I don’t think so,” she agreed.

“It was the
Blue Jay
,” he confirmed. “And that cruiser – it’s after Captain Rice too, right?”

“Most likely,” she said. “And if it’s commanded by who I fear, they may be able to track the
Blue Jay
into jump. I need to know where they went, Captain Seule.”

“Ma’am, there are some secrets that are not mine to reveal, however pretty I think you are or friendly Captain Rice was,” Seule said calmly.

“Captain Seule – that cruiser is going to follow the
Blue Jay
wherever they went,” Alaura Stealey told him quietly. “Whoever shelters him, whoever aids him, is going to face the wrath of Mikhail Azure. Whoever you’re protecting may already be doomed.”

The dark-haired Captain nodded once, and sighed again.

“I sent them to Darkport, Lady Hand,” he said calmly. “I’ll send you the co-ordinates. But if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to find a new region of space to frequent.”

Darkport.

About the only place in the galaxy Alaura would call a worse hive of scum and villainy than Amber.

The video channel was cut off, and Alaura watched the
Luciole
break away from its hiding spot and flare its engines – heading away from the
Tides
.

“Captain Barnett,” she said quietly. “Set your course for Nia Kriti.”

“Ma’am?” the Mage-Captain replied. “We have the co-ordinates for Darkport.”

“This ship is extremely modern and extremely well-crewed,” the Hand told her ship’s captain softly. “But she cannot face a cruiser alone.”

“There is a Navy base at Nia Kriti. We need more ships.”

###

Alaura Stealey was a Hand of the Mage-King of Mars, the King’s voice and his sword in the worlds beyond the Sol System – a Judge and warrior; the representative of the executive branch of the government that ruled humanity.

She was not used to being kept waiting.

The gray-haired woman stood impatiently in the outer office of Mage-Admiral Lillian Castello, commander of the Royal Martian Navy’s Seventh Cruiser Squadron, and the station commander of the Nia Kriti Naval Base.

Stealey had arrived in the system nine hours before and her personal transport had set new speed records closing the distance to the Naval Base. After that rush, however, she’d now been left cooling her heels in the Admiral’s office for forty minutes.

She turned back towards the door with its Marine sentry, about to order the neatly turned out young man to stand aside, when it
finally
slid open. A middle aged woman in the dark blue uniform of a Navy Captain exited the office, presumably the commanding officer of the cruiser they were aboard, the
Rising Sun of Gallantry.

Alaura was through the door into Castello’s office before the ship’s captain had half-completed her salute. The Admiral sat on the other side of a massive desk of dark black wood, polished to a fine sheen, her mouth half-open in an unvoiced protest as the Hand crossed the space to her desk and stood, facing her in silence.

The two women regarded each other for a long moment. Alaura knew that what Castello saw was unimpressive. The Hand wore an unmarked, black, version of the Navy’s uniform, from which hung the open-palmed golden hand of her symbol of office. She was short, stocky, and graying – unbothered by her appearance, she’d declined the many and varied treatments available to a citizen of the Protectorate to reverse the look of age.

Castello, on the other hand, was a lithe red-headed woman who looked in her early thirties – and was closer, Alaura knew, to seventy.

“How may I… assist you?” the Admiral said after a long pregnant pause.

“You were sent a brief of the situation and the forces I requested,” Alaura told her calmly. “I presume you have reviewed it?”

“Frankly, Lady Hand, I have not had time,” Castello replied, her tone icy. “I am responsible for a security area of fourteen star systems. I cannot drop everything every time a self-important flunky from Mars arrives.”

Alaura regarded the other woman with a degree of calm she didn’t feel.

“I am sorry,” she said calmly. “Did you just tell me you intentionally disregarded a Priority Alpha-One Communique from a
Hand of the Mage-King
?”

“Everyone who comes to this system thinks their needs are Alpha-One, Lady Stealey,” Castello replied. “It is my job to decide whose needs actually
are
.”

“Who is your second-in-command?” Alaura asked.

“What?” Castello replied, startled.

“Who is your second-in-command?” Alaura repeated. “Since you are so busy, I will do you the courtesy of not imposing further on your time.”

“Mage-Commodore James Medici of the Fifteenth Destroyers,” the Admiral said slowly.

“Very well. Pack your things,” Alaura ordered. “Mage-
Admiral
Medici will be assuming command of the Seventh Cruisers, as well as the Fifteenth Destroyers, to accompany me on my mission.”

“You don’t have that authority!” Castello bellowed, surging to her feet.

“I am His Majesty’s
Hand
,
Admiral,” Stealey said flatly. “Be grateful I do not relieve you of your
commission
. You will transfer your flag to one of the ships remaining – I will be taking your cruisers and Medici’s destroyers.

“If I were you,” she continued, “I would
pray
that your delay does not result in the failure of my mission. His Majesty will be…
displeased
if that’s the case.”

Alaura turned on her heel and strode from the Admiral’s office, leaving the woman whose career she’d just shattered staring after her in shock.

#

James Medici was waiting for Alaura once she returned to the
Tides of Justice
, the destroyer she used as her personal transport. The newly-promoted Mage-Admiral was a tiny man with skin as black as night and the slanted eyes of a Martian native.

“Lady Hand,” he greeted her calmly.

“You’ll need to get new insignia, Admiral Medici,” Stealey told him calmly. He still wore the single star of a Navy Commodore, not the two stars of an Admiral.

“I believed reviewing your brief and meeting with you were a higher priority,” he told her dryly. “I did not wish to raise your ire as Lillian has done.”

“That would be difficult,” the Hand replied. “My office,” she ordered curtly, allowing Mage-Lieutenant Harmon, her personal aide and ‘Navy Liaison’ to lead the way. Medici was silent until they reached her office and Harmon had left them in private.

“Admiral Castello is a capable officer with a lot on her plate,” he said quietly. “Your arrival was unexpected, and this region has more than a few priority concerns.”

“That is my presumption, Admiral Medici,” Alaura told him. “That is why the Admiral is still employed. That said, I need her ships – and I
don’t
trust her to command them in action. Don’t disappoint me.”

He nodded sharply, standing calmly at attention as she took a seat behind her desk. She gestured Medici to a chair, but he shrugged and remained standing.

“You have reviewed the brief,” Alaura reminded him. “Your opinion?”

“The cruiser represents a significant threat to the security of the Fringe,” Medici agreed. “She is insufficient to present a major threat to the MidWorlds or the Core, of course, but her presence in the hands of the Blue Star Syndicate is a concern.

“That said, the force level you are requesting seems excessive,” he continued. “A squadron of cruisers, a squadron of destroyers and three Marine battalion transports? I’ve seen planetwide rebellions suppressed with one cruiser, let alone eight with as many destroyers.”

“You have professional blinders, Admiral,” Alaura told him calmly. Unlike with Castello, at least he’d
read
the briefing and seemed prepared to listen. “You’re focusing on the rogue warship and not the other factors in play.”

“Ma’am?”

“The destruction of the Syndicate’s cruiser is a priority,” she told him, “but it is one of
two
Alpha-One priorities at play here. The second is the capture of the
Blue Jay
and Ship’s Mage Damien Montgomery – and Montgomery
must
be captured alive. That requires numbers, to make sure he doesn’t run.

“I also wish to minimize casualties when bringing the Syndicate cruiser down,” Alaura continued, “for which overwhelming force seems wise. Could you guarantee the destruction of the ship with no casualties with a lesser force?”

Medici shrugged, still standing at a slightly relaxed form of attention as he faced her, his hands clasped behind his back.

“There are no guarantees in combat, ma’am,” he reminded her. “Even outnumbered seventeen to one and out-massed nine to one, the Syndicate ship may still inflict damage.”

“The ships are available,” Alaura concluded, “so we will use them. They will also come in handy in exploiting the opportunity we have been handed – the opportunity I want those Marine transports for.”

“I’ll admit to being unclear on that, ma’am,” the Admiral said. “My understanding is that we are pursuing the
Blue Jay
, as we know her destination and that the Blue Star ship is also chasing her. Why are we bringing enough Marines to fight a mid-sized war?”

“I take it you didn’t note
where
we know
Blue Jay
is going, Admiral,” the Hand replied. “My information is that the
Jay
is headed to Darkport to take on supplies and make repairs. I have the co-ordinates.

“If we can bring our various prey to bay there, so much the better. But I see no reason to pass up the opportunity to wipe out the center of the Protectorate’s slave trade when it is handed to me on a silver platter!”

The little Admiral considered for a long moment, and then nodded.

“Darkport,” he said quietly. “That’s a pockmark on the universe I’ll be glad to burn out.”

#

“I guess that answers that question,” Mikhail Azure said drily, watching the footage on the main viewscreen of the Blue Star Syndicate cruiser
Azure Gauntlet
. His cruiser.

The screen was showing the now six days old light from when the deadliest bounty hunter he’d ever known had finally caught up with the
Blue Jay
and its ever-frustrating Captain. For several moments, the crime lord had begun to believe that his pursuit of the hunter and the freighter had been unnecessary.

Then the
Jay
’s ‘discarded’ fuel tanker had lit up its engines and rammed the bounty hunter ship, removing the most useful contractor Azure had known in recent years from the galaxy in an explosion that put stars to shame.

He crossed over to where Wong, the Captain of the
Gauntlet
, was reviewing the information from the sensors.

“Well, Mister Wong?” he said calmly. “Can you track them now?”

“Now that I can identify the source of the interference, yes,” the other man replied. Wong was one of the few in the Protectorate who had mastered the complex art of tracking a jumpship through its jump. “That explosion threw out a massive amount of energy,” he continued. “There was no way we could track the
Blue Jay
through its aftermath.”

Azure nodded grimly. If he’d had even the slightest doubts in Wong’s ability, the Tracker’s insistence that he was unable to pick jump signatures out of the hash of radiation in this quiet corner of deep space would have resulted in the
Gauntlet
having a new Captain. As it was, the four day exercise of jumping ever-further out, trying to get ahead of the light and radiation from the ‘battle’ had strained his patience to the limit.

“Able did not survive?” he asked.

“Only one jump signature, and there was no ship left when we were there,” Wong answered with a shrug. “Your Hunter is dead.”

Wong did not sound displeased that the
second
-best Tracker in the Protectorate was dead.

“Then find me the
Blue Jay
,” Azure told him. “We better not need to repeat this,” he added, gesturing at the old light scans on the screen.

“We won’t,” Wong confirmed. “We will gain on them quickly now. Five days at most – they have only Montgomery to jump them, after all.”

Azure himself had never learned to jump a starship, but Wong had three Mages serving on his ship. They would jump three times as fast as the
Blue Jay
. Unless Wong was somehow unable to track the
Jay
again, they would soon bring their prey to heel.

The
Blue Jay
and its Mage would make Azure even more powerful than he was now – and the capture of the freighter’s Captain would finally allow him to avenge his son’s death.

He settled back into his chair as Wong began to co-ordinate the jump. He would wait. Impatient as he was, for this prize, Mikhail Azure could wait.

#

The system looked empty. Dead. The ugly bloated red giant of a star recently out of its transition from a smaller sun illuminated the shattered wreck of the system it had eaten. A single gas giant, half again the size of Sol’s Jupiter, orbited well outside the sparse remnants of what had likely been a dense asteroid belt once. Inside the asteroid belt, two rocky balls of worlds orbited, both seared clean of any atmosphere when their star had begun to burn helium.

The ship that had surveyed the system, almost a hundred years ago now, had written the entire place off as useless, even going so far as to name the system Nani Mo Nashi. According to the survey database the
Blue Jay
had provided Damien, the name meant roughly ‘there’s nothing here.’

“I’ve seen colleges after exams are over with more life than this place,” the young Ship’s Mage announced over the intercom to the bridge. “There’s really supposed to be something here?”

“You’re seeing what they want you to see,” Captain David Rice replied. The ship’s stocky Captain tapped a command on the panel on his chair, zooming in the main viewscreen – and the screen in Damien’s simulacrum chamber at the center of the ship that was currently mirroring it –on the gas giant.

“Most of the system is dead, but Nashi Three has a massive moon, four times the size of Earth,” Rice explained. “This gives it gas giant sized Lagrange points here, here, and here.”

Three spheres were defined on the screen in transparent blinking white light. ‘Nashi Three’ was the gas giant, which had never earned a name other than that of its system. Who would name worlds in a system they never expected humanity to visit?