Starship's Mage: Episode 4 Page 8

  “So we know where he’ll come out,” Kelly said aloud, and everyone in the room, including Damien looked at the young engineer. “I have an idea, sir,” she told David.

  #

  Freighters were not, by their nature, stealthy creatures. Nonetheless, that was what David was aiming for five hours later. They’d shut down the engines. Halted the spinning of the Ribs. Turned off every exterior light. He’d even, over Kellers’ protests, ordered the engineer to shut down the main heat exchanger.

  They couldn’t do the last for very long – an hour at most – or they’d start to cook in their own skins. But it made them, for a little while, as invisible as they could be.

  Kelly had joined him and Jenna on the bridge to help execute her plan. She was having trouble not watching the screen showing the Simulacrum Chamber where Damien was floating next to the Simulacrum, doing his best to ignore his broken leg.

  Exactly five hours, almost to the second, after Damien had jumped them away their sensors reported a new jump flare. Erupting into deep space just over three million kilometers away, the familiar sight of the bounty hunter’s modified yacht appeared from nothingness. The Blue Jay’s cameras had just enough resolution to show the black and twisted scar along the surface of the ovoid hull where Seule’s lasers had hit – but also enough to show the still functional gunports of the hunter’s dozen missile launchers.

  “Arrogant asshole,” David heard Jenna muttered, and shook his head. He couldn’t disagree. If the Blue Jay had had anything resembling real weapons, they could have opened fire immediately. A battle laser couldn’t normally score reliable hits at this range, but it would take thirty seconds or so for the ship to start moving. A Martian destroyer could have shredded the yacht before it even reacted.

  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 unn
oticed.

  “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 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.”

  ###

  Starship’s Mage concludes in Episode 5

  Coming December 2014

  If you liked the novella, please leave a review!

  Follow Glynn Stewart on Twitter @faolanspen or on his blog at www.faolanspen.com

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