Interstellar Mage (Starship's Mage: Red Falcon Book 1) Read online

  “Of course.” Both Marines saluted regardless. “Corporal Lisa Ambrose, Red Falcon security. You’re expected.”

  “I’m meeting with Captain Rice and Officer Campbell, correct?”

  “Officer Campbell is in the hospital,” Ambrose replied. “She’ll recover, but you’re just meeting with the Captain today.”

  “What happened?” Maria asked. From her conversation with Alois, she could guess. It seemed that the good Captain’s past was already catching up with him. The ex-Marines were less decorative than she’d thought, then.

  “Not my place to say,” the guard said crisply. “We got hired after; don’t know the details anyway. Skipper is waiting for you in the office. Good luck, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Corporal.”

  PAST THE GUARDS, the rental office was a small space. A tiny reception area with a drink station, a meeting room and four offices. The reception desk was occupied by a tall, dark-haired man with his feet up—and a standard Royal Martian Marine Corps nine-millimeter battle rifle lying on the desk next to him.

  “Captain Rice is in the third office,” the man told her. “You’re the senior Ship’s Mage candidate? Soprano, right?”

  “I am,” she said. “And you are?”

  “Ivan Skavar, the new Chief of Security. Recently of His Majesty’s Corps.”

  “I’m shocked,” Maria replied dryly. “You and the two outside couldn’t scream ‘Marine’ more obviously if you had big flashing signs.”

  Skavar grinned.

  “I was going for ‘threatening’,” he admitted, “but I’m not going to blink at people picking up on where the new hires came from. The Captain gave me a generous salary and a generous budget—and is a damned good man, from what I see.”

  The cheerful grin evaporated instantly and black eyes focused on Maria like a tracking gun turret. She’d seen warmer eyes on the JAG prosecutor who’d cashiered her.

  “And I know your story, Commander Soprano,” he said levelly. “And the mess you’ve made of yourself the last year or so. If you’re looking for an easy ride, I suggest you keep walking.”

  Well, if Skavar was someone’s plant, he at least didn’t seem to be Alois’s plant.

  Maria took a deep breath and summoned her best officer’s glare, focusing on the ex-noncom with a level look as she pinned him to the wall with her eyes.

  “That isn’t your call, Chief,” she said. “But for your information, I’m here because someone dragged me out of the damned bottle and sent me on my way. Clawing upwards is all we got from here, but I’ll remind you that if the Captain hires me, you will answer to me.”

  Skavar blinked and the gun turret was gone, the smile returning with a disarming warmth.

  “All right, boss lady,” he told her. “Last I checked, as Chief of Security, I’ll report to the Captain, but if he hires you, we’ll work together. Just…fuck over Rice or fuck me over and there’ll be hell to pay.”

  Her medallion with its Combat Mage swords didn’t seem to faze him.

  “Third office, you said?” she asked sweetly, trading firm, understanding nods with the Marine.

  “That one,” Skavar replied, pointing helpfully.

  THE OFFICE WAS JUST as plain as the reception area or the door. While Rice clearly had resources—he wouldn’t be a starship captain if he didn’t!—he clearly wasn’t splurging them on his space for meeting with people.

  The man himself was equally plain, a stocky broad-shouldered man with graying mild brown hair who remined her of any of a dozen Chief Petty Officers she’d worked with over her career. David Rice seemed calm, inoffensive—nothing special enough to warrant the effort the Martian Interstellar Security Service had gone through to make sure she ended up as his Mage.

  And then he looked up and she met his gaze. There was no pressure, no flatness. None of the forceful aggression her “officer’s glare” contained. And yet…there was no question in that instant which of them was in charge.

  “Captain Rice,” she greeted him, offering her hand across the table. “I am Mage Maria Soprano.”

  He shook her hand firmly and warmly, gesturing her to a seat.

  “Welcome, Mage Soprano,” he said. “You come surprisingly highly recommended by His Majesty’s Navy for someone they cashiered.”

  She sighed.

  “It was not a dishonorable discharge,” she pointed out.

  “But it was also not a voluntary one,” Rice replied. “And yet your contact info was given to me—along with your full Navy file, if you were wondering—by Commodore Burns. I find that an interesting contradiction, don’t you?”

  “I was discharged without prejudice for disobedience to orders,” Maria said woodenly. She’d hoped to not have to face this today, but she’d expected it regardless. “Regardless of that, however, I am a skilled and decorated Ship’s Mage from His Majesty’s Service.

  “I am a trained Jump Mage, an experienced department administrator, and a fully trained Combat Mage,” she continued. “I was executive officer of my last ship.”

  “I did you the courtesy of not reading the portion of the file related to your discharge,” Rice told her. “Explain it to me.”

  “That’s…quite the ask,” Maria admitted, trying to marshal her thoughts.

  “As Ship’s Mage, you would be my first officer, above even my XO,” he replied. “I have read your record, the citations for your decorations, the details of a decade of distinguished service. I have every faith in the skills and experience of the woman those files and your resume describe.

  “What I do not know and must, Mage Soprano, understand is the quality of that woman’s judgment. I must understand what that decorated and distinguished officer did to earn a ‘discharge without prejudice’—and I must understand why.

  “The cut-and-dried reports of a court-martial won’t tell me that,” he concluded. “Only you can. So…Mage Soprano. Explain it to me.”

  She swallowed hard, her thoughts and memories mostly corralled into line, and met Rice’s gaze again.

  “I was executive officer aboard the destroyer Swords at Dawn,” she began. “We were docked at the New Berlin system when a damaged starship limped into the system. They’d been part of a convoy that had been ambushed on the way to the Ardennes System.

  “New Berlin has a Runic Transceiver Array, and my captain was down on the planet. He reported in and touched base with Ardennes. We were closest to the incident, but with only one destroyer, the decision was made to have Commodore Cor carry out the counter-operation with her cruisers.”

  Maria shook her head, keeping her face a mask.

  “The distances and times were wrong,” she admitted. “We were close, and too many people had been captured. The extra few days until Cor could intervene would leave civilians to die.

  “Captain Janson told me the situation was under control and returned his shore leave. I and the other senior officers, however, had spoken to the crew of the freighter that escaped. We—I felt that something had to be done.”

  Regardless of what she’d told the court-martial, it hadn’t been entirely her idea. She suspected JAG had known that too but had let her throw herself on her sword for the bridge officers.

  “We abandoned Captain Janson and took off back along the route to where the pirates had ambushed the convoy. They’d left a ship behind to try and take out anyone who came in to do search and rescue, but she was an under-gunned pinnace—handful of fusion missiles and a laser, no match for a Navy destroyer.”

  “I’m familiar with the type,” Rice said dryly, gesturing for her to continue.

  “We disabled her and boarded her, interrogating her Captain to learn where the pirate home base was.” She sighed. “If we’d stopped there and waited for Commodore Cor to arrive, the results would have justified our actions.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “What did you do?” Rice asked.

  “We discovered they were based out of an old mining stat
ion in the outer asteroid belt of New Berlin, one of the ones that was abandoned when they realized the outer belt was too far to be practical,” Maria told him. “It had been right under our nose and we missed them, and I think we all took it personally.”

  “Isn’t New Berlin’s outer belt half a light-month away from the star?” the Captain asked dryly.

  “Yes. There was no way we would have known they were there, but still…we felt responsible. And we didn’t take the pirates’ warning of how powerful their ‘mighty flotilla’ was seriously.

  “So, we went after them. One destroyer. One company of Marines.” Maria shook her head. “Dios mío, we were arrogant.”

  “What happened?”

  “We punched out their flotilla of cheap armed jump-ships, got half-wrecked in the process, and inserted our Marines. It was a shit-show in progress, but our Marines were holding their own…and then their other hunting flotilla arrived.

  “We were out of ammo, mostly crippled and entirely unfit for a fight. We had to withdraw, abandoning our Marines to try and hold what they’d taken of the station.”

  She shivered. She could still remember Xu telling her to run, that a suicide stand would be pointless.

  “It turned out that Commodores Cor and O’Reilly had been hunting this particular pirate group for months as the bastards moved from system to system. They’d all but nailed down the base, and the freighter that had limped into Ardennes shortly before the one that reached New Berlin told them exactly where they needed to be.

  “Their carefully planned operation with full details on the enemy fired off about twelve hours after our half-cocked assault,” she said quietly. “The flotilla I couldn’t fight with my stolen, half-wrecked destroyer didn’t stand a chance against four cruisers with full escort. They landed an entire brigade of Marines to extract Xu and the prisoners.

  “Everything had been in hand, but we hadn’t had need-to-know and thought too highly of ourselves,” Maria concluded. “We probably saved a few prisoners who might have been killed or raped in those intervening hours. We definitely got forty-three Marines and sixty-one Navy personnel killed…but on the other hand, we killed nine pirate ships that otherwise might have got away.”

  “But they might not have, either,” Rice said quietly.

  “No. Which is why I took the fall for my crew and got kicked out of the Navy,” she told him. “The final call was mine at each step of the way. I was responsible, and I got a hundred people killed who didn’t need to die.”

  “Wrong thing, sorta right reasons,” he concluded. “Would you do it again?”

  Maria hesitated. “I don’t know. I think I’d ask for more details on what was being done, in the same situation, rather than firing off with half a brain. But…without knowing that the relief force was on the way and knowing the pirates had prisoners?”

  She hadn’t really thought about it.

  “I might,” she admitted. “But I’d like to think I’d find out if I needed to, first.”

  “We all make mistakes,” Rice told her. “I once found out I had a cargo of containers full of cryo-frozen sex slaves. It’s what we do after that that matters.”

  “I haven’t done much since,” she admitted.

  “You protected your crew. You accepted your punishment. Now you’re trying to still make something of yourself,” he pointed out. “So, what would you do if you found slaves aboard the ship?”

  The question surprised her, but it was also clear that it was something he needed to know.

  Maria met his gaze and smiled grimly.

  “You’d have about forty-five seconds to convince me you didn’t know either before you’d be breathing vacuum and I’d be taking over,” she admitted. “There damn well wouldn’t be any delivery going on.”

  Rice nodded with a grim laugh.

  “Good enough.”

  “Good enough?” she asked.

  “You’re hired. We take possession of Red Falcon in thirty-six hours, and my XO isn’t out of the hospital for five more days. Congratulations, you’re the new first officer, and that means you’re helping me interview everyone else.”

  Rice grinned.

  “Get ready for a grueling two weeks, Ship’s Mage. I plan to be underway in fifteen days, and I have no idea what quirks we’re going to find aboard Falcon.”

  “I served aboard Scarlett for a year early in my career,” Maria told him. “The AAFHF ships are pretty quirky birds, all things considered.”

  “I know, on both counts,” her new Captain confirmed. “But I still wasn’t going to hire you until I was sure I knew how you ticked.”

  6

  Red Falcon hung in space, suspended against the starry sky by a series of fueling umbilicals and support gantries. The Navy shuttle that arced David and his newly reinforced senior officers around their ship flew slowly, allowing them to take it in as Commodore Burns pointed out features.

  “Unlike the Venice class that you’re most familiar with, all of the crew compartments and working spaces are concentrated at the front of the ship, under the radiation cap,” the yardmaster pointed out, gesturing to the thickest part of the “stem”, with a rotating ring wrapped around it but still inside the “mushroom cap”.

  “While most civilian vessels are looking to maximize cubage, and the rib design is useful for that, the designers of the AAFHF type were mostly warship designers,” he admitted. “They had enough civilian input to install the centripetal gravity ring in the first place, but these ships were intended for a high-threat environment.”

  Burns pointed out a quartet of pods that hung between the thick inner core of the ship and the rotating ring.

  “Those are emergency engines,” he said. “Not as powerful as the main drives by a long shot, but they’re not designed to move the whole ship. They’re designed to move the forward crew components after you’ve abandoned the cargo.”

  “That wouldn’t work with the jump matrix,” Soprano objected. David was amused by the Commodore following the usual pattern of men interacting with his new Ship’s Mage—his gaze turned to her, flicked down to her chest and then immediately refocused on her face.

  “The simulacrum needs to be at the center of the ship,” the Mage continued. “If you were to chop off two thirds of the length, you’d lose the simulacrum chamber.”

  “You would,” Burns agreed. “It’s an emergency measure and, well…the same process that would eject the rear portion of the ship would bring the simulacrum chamber forward. It’s a destructive process,” he concluded, “and one I wouldn’t recommend you try. The ship won’t be reparable afterwards.”

  “That sounds more expensive than I want to have as my headache,” David agreed. “Why did we even leave the pods installed?”

  “I was told to give you the ship with all of its gear fully intact,” Burns replied. “Guns, quirks, missiles, engines—the works.”

  “Speaking of guns,” Skavar noted as they approached the edge of the radiation cap.

  “This is where we’re back to ‘the designers were used to building warships’,” the Commodore said. “Most of our warships are optimized for pursuit. A freighter, logically, shouldn’t have the same optimization, but…”

  “They didn’t think of it?” David asked.

  “So far as I can tell,” Burns agreed. “All of your missile launchers and beams are in the front cap. You have RFLAM turrets space along the length of the spine to cover the cargo, but your offensive weapons are mounted in the radiation cap, which is also far more heavily armored than the rest of the hull.”

  “So, we have an armed freighter built like a battering ram?” said freighter’s new Captain observed.

  “Yes,” the Commodore said. “You’ve got the engines to pull ten gravities at full load, but most of the ship’s gravity runes were grounded and discharged.” He shrugged apologetically at Soprano. “It’ll be up to you and your Ship’s Mages whether you want to recharge any of them, or how many.”

  “The run
es were left throughout the ship?” Soprano asked.

  “Everywhere except the gravity ring,” the Navy officer confirmed. “Same as a Navy vessel. The AAFHFs were built to be Navy vessels.”

  “Every trick and gear intact,” David echoed, studying the ship the Mage-King had given him. “This is one hell of a compensation package, Commodore.”

  “I’m not entirely certain just what you did for His Majesty, Captain Rice, but this is what he ordered me to give you in return,” the Commodore said. “Everything we can do has been done. She’s been fueled and cleaned. We did first-run checks of her systems, but she’s been in mothballs for four years, Captain.”

  “We’re going to find problems,” David agreed. “Some of them won’t show up until we’re six jumps from anywhere and it’s all down to our crew and engineers. James?”

  The fifth, so-far-silent occupant of the shuttle grinned brightly at him, his teeth shockingly white against skin the color of a starless night.

  “Then you’ll be glad you have me,” James Kellers, David’s old chief engineer replied. “Because I’m pretty sure I can fix whatever you break, Captain.”

  “You always have,” David said. “You always have.”

  “That’s the outside tour,” Burns told him. “Shall I have the pilot bring us in?”

  THE SHUTTLE carefully maneuvered onto the floor of Red Falcon’s shuttle bay, magnetic feet locking the spacecraft in place.

  To David’s surprise, however, she wasn’t the only shuttle in the bay. Red Falcon had three shuttle bays—two in the main working section at the front, just behind the gravitational ring, and one at the back by the engines—and each had twice as much capacity as the one bay aboard his old Blue Jay.

  He’d been budgeting for filling them as best he could, but he’d been planning to operate with roughly a third of the heavy-lift shuttles a ship of Red Falcon’s immense size needed.

  Shuttle Bay Alpha, however, already contained neatly locked-down rows of shuttles. Eight heavy-lift shuttles, four personnel shuttles and four repair pods were lined up in the bay, and David sneaked a suspicious glance at Burns.