Starship's Mage: Episode 5 (2 page)

“From the co-ordinates Seule gave us, Darkport is at this one,” Jenna told the two men, zooming in the view on the Lagrange point directly ahead of the immense moon. Zoomed in that far, even the
Blue Jay
’s powerful telescopes could only reveal so much, but they showed that the low gravity zone had accumulated a small collection of good-sized asteroids, including one easily eighty kilometers across.

“I have thermals in that cluster that aren’t natural,” Damien told the two bridge officers softly. He floated at the heart of the ship, one of his hands on the magical Simulacrum that allowed him to cast magic through the ship itself. The walls of the simulacrum chamber were coated in screens showing the stars and space around the
Jay
, and Damien had begun to master the techniques of adding the more esoteric sensors the starship commanded to that view.

“Looks like at least a dozen ships,” he concluded. “If they’re careful, they can jump in and out a lot closer than we did – and if they have any kind of sensor network, anyone leaving can use the giant as a shield to hide their jump flare.”

“It’s a clever set up,” David agreed. “Jenna, set us a course for the cluster. We’ll see how well this ‘bounty hunter truce’ holds up once we show up.”

Captain Seule, the man who’d sent them here, had assured them that no bounty hunter would try and take them on Darkport. Apparently, the Family that ran the station disapproved of trouble.

Of course, given the… enthusiasm the
Blue Jay
’s pursuers had shown so far, Damien wasn’t entirely sure that the threat of such disapproval would be enough.

#

It took the
Blue Jay
twenty-one hours to attract the attention of Darkport’s equivalent of Traffic Control. David figured that emerging three light minutes away, easily halfway to the bloated sun at the center of Nani Mo Nashi, had kept them from being noticed. As soon as they made turnover on a Darkport-bound course, however, the station noticed them.

The audio-only transmission, when it arrived, was short and to the point:

“I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, but if you don’t explain yourself damn-sweet, you’re going to be eating missiles up the exhaust port,
capiche
?”

“They’re not kidding, boss,” Jenna told him. The ship’s husky first officer focused in on a new pair of infrared signatures that had materialized in the Lagrange point they were heading to. The telescope showed them as regular looking shuttles, only slightly larger than the four heavy fusion missiles strapped to them. “Missile boats. No idea how good the missiles are, but it doesn’t take much for eight birds to ruin our day.”

“I was planning on playing nice anyway,” David reminded her. He turned to the small camera installed on his captain’s chair and hit record.

“This is David Rice of the
Blue Jay
,” he told the station. “Captain Nathan Seule sent me. We’re looking for somewhere to rest and refit, away from prying Protectorate eyes.”

Three minutes later, the audio transmission was replaced by a video transmission, and David knew he’d said the right things. A young, swarthy-looking man with dark hair dressed in an extremely old fashioned suit faced the camera in an extremely ordinary looking traffic control center.

“Darkport is not a resort, Captain,” he told David. “That said, if you have trade goods or physical transfer chips, you can do business here.”

“Looks like Seule’s name does open the door,” David muttered to Jenna, but the traffic controller was still speaking.

“You may continue to approach the station, but be advised we will acquire weapons lock at seven million kilometers – just to discourage any ideas, you understand,” he said calmly.

“The rules of Darkport are simple. This station is run by the Falcone Family. You fuck with Falcone affairs, we kill you. You risk the atmo integrity of the station, we kill you. You break the bounty ban, we kill you.”

“Your safety and the safety of your goods are your problem,” he concluded. “The Family are neither cops nor courts. Cause too much trouble, though, and we kill you.”

“Your docking fees are payable upon arrival in goods or physical transfer chips, as assessed by the Family
Capo
on hand when you arrive.”

“If you’ve any issues, you can fuck on off right out of our system.
Capiche
?”

David waited for a moment to be sure the Mafia made man was done talking before turning on his recorder again.

“I get it,” he said flatly. “We’ll be docking in,” he checked the system, “twenty hours and thirty-one minutes. We’ll negotiate trade good value when we arrive.”

He ended the recording and turned to his XO.

“They sound wonderfully welcoming, don’t they?” he asked dryly.

“They just want our money,” she replied. “Speaking of which…?”

“We have physical transfer chips,” David confirmed. The small black chips contained a specific amount recorded into it by a bank, and were registered ‘to the bearer.’ The Protectorate Council made noises every few years about banning the last form of cash currency, but an anonymous form of interstellar payment was too useful to too many people for that to happen.

“I didn’t want to let the Family know that right off the bat though,” he continued. “I suspect that hunter ship came from here, and those missile boats make me nervous. I don’t want to give them ideas about taking the ship.”

“So you’re assuming they haven’t heard of us, then?” Jenna asked, and David winced.

He hadn’t exactly
forgotten
that the bounty hunters seemed to know that Damien had transformed the
Blue Jay
’s jump matrix into a fully functional unrestricted amplifier for magic, but it hadn’t occurred to him as a factor.

“If they’ve heard about us, they’ll want the ship anyway, won’t they?” he admitted aloud. “There’s not much we can do about that, except hope that the bounty ban works in our favor.”

“Keep guards on the doors and guards on anyone who goes on-station?” she suggested.

“Given the rules and the threat level, I think I need to take Damien,” David said grimly. “His magic is the deadliest short-range weapon we have, and he won’t rip a hole in the hull.”

Jenna looked at the asteroid on the screens and grimaced. “Is this place as bad as I think it’s going to be, boss?” she asked quietly. “Do you
really
want Damien to see that?”

“Even here, they won’t pick a fight with a Mage,” the Captain told her. “It’ll be an unfortunate wake-up for him, but I don’t think we have a choice.”

#

Damien watched their missile boat escorts carefully as the
Blue Jay
began their final approach to Darkport. The two heavily armed shuttles had met them well away from the asteroid and accompanied them in, as if they expected the unarmed freighter to cause trouble.

With Damien standing at the simulacrum at the center of the ship, his gloves off and the silver runes inlaid into his palms ready to complete the freighter’s amplifier matrix, the ship was hardly unarmed. He hoped that Darkport’s masters didn’t know that.

“Those look familiar,” Jenna said over the bridge link, and Damien looked up at that screen to see what she was pointing at.

Floating gently in space was a pair of familiar looking jump-yachts. A quick query of
Blue Jay
’s computers proved them to be the exact same model as had pursued them at Chrysanthemum and Excelsior.

Despite a momentary panic, Damien was quickly able to confirm they were, at least, different
ships
. With the scanners focused in on the two vessels, he was able to tell they had different armaments from the first hunter ship – but were both definitely armed.

“Hunter ships,” David confirmed. “There’s another docked with the asteroid,” the Captain pointed out. “We’re putting our lives in the Falcone family’s hands here – if any of those guys want to break the bounty ban, this could get messy fast.”

“They’re criminals. Can we trust them?” Damien asked softly. The
Blue Jay
’s computer was now identifying missile installations on the surface of the asteroids – easily half a destroyer squadron’s worth of launchers.

“The Falcone trace their origins back to Sicily on Earth – in the nineteenth century,” David explained. “They’ve been criminals since before we had spaceflight – and they’ve survived because they have a code, and they
mean
it. You won’t get a Falcone to sign a contract or make a vow lightly, but the keep their word.”

“So when they say they’ll kill anyone who breaks the bounty ban…” Jenna asked.

“They will,” David confirmed. “The problem is what those rules
don’t
say. There’s nothing about the
Falcones
collecting bounties in there. We’ll need to watch our backs.”

“Damien, you’re with me,” he ordered. “I don’t want to carry military-grade weaponry on that station, but we can’t afford to appear weak. Meet me in the shuttle bay in ten.”

On the screens that covered the walls of the
Blue Jay
’s simulacrum chamber, a massive hangar was now visible, carved into the asteroid beneath them. They were almost on top of the asteroid, moving at a handful of meters per second. If anyone was going to attack them, they’d have done it by now.

“All right, Captain,” Damien agreed. “Let’s be about it.”

#

Damien didn’t know what he’d expected of the central marketplace of a pirate station, but the Grand Bazaar of Darkport was not it. The docks and the tunnels away from them had lived down to his expectations – dark and dreary holes blasted out of the asteroid rock with cheap explosives. The ventilation ducting and power piping had simply been bolted into arbitrarily selected walls of the zero-gravity passages. There were no safety warnings, no hazard labels – just neatly lettered signs providing directions to the various chambers of the pirate asteroid.

They’d followed the signs to the Grand Bazaar, and came out into brightly lit and brightly colored chaos. Someone had either taken a natural cavern, or one that had been blasted out while extracting ore to build the station, and installed a massive cylinder a hundred meters across and five hundred meters long.

That cylinder was now spinning at an eye-tearing three times a minute, producing a full half-gravity on its outside edge. That outside edge, all sixteen hectares or so of it, was covered in a garishly colored mess of tents, shacks, and stalls.

“How many people are in here?” Damien asked aloud.

“Thousands,” David responded quietly as they stood on the edge of the tunnel that led into the center of the cylinder. “There’s a lot more people here than I expected – they’ve got to see a lot more business than even my worst fears.”

With a sigh and a shrug, the burly Captain gestured Damien onto one of several platforms, clearly large enough for significant amounts of cargo but also the only way to the ‘floor’ of the Bazaar. The controls blinked at them until David sighed again and fed it a small black chip. The system ground for a moment, and then allowed them to descend.

Damien looked at the chip in interest. In all of his twenty-six years, he’d never actually had to use a physical bank transfer chip. The presumably-small-denomination one his Captain had just paid for an elevator ride with was the first one he’d ever seen. Charging for an elevator-ride seemed petty to him, but he wasn’t the one running a black market on the edge of nowhere.

The ride was surprisingly slow, and the young Mage took advantage of the opportunity to look around. He and David were both dressed in casual clothes over body armor. The Captain wore a black leather jacket that covered the armor neatly. Damien wore the armor under a mock-necked turtleneck, clearing showing the black leather collar around his neck with the gold medallion marking him as a Mage.

Even here, he was sure that medallion would buy him a bit more respect and security.

“Do we know where we’re going?” he asked David as they reached the ground and they stepped out into the pseudo-gravity.

“Not really,” his Captain admitted. “From what I saw from the center, it’s pretty disorganized. I thought I saw a collection of starship parts that way,” he continued, gesturing along the cylinder, “and I’m hoping they have a missile launcher or two we can mount on the
Jay
.”

Damien nodded, and the pair set off through the crowds. Many of the stalls and structures were open-roofed, taking advantage of the lack of weather in a cylinder like this. Even the open-roofed structures, though, had fully-enclosed storage areas, often with complex looking locking mechanisms and
always
under the eye of someone carrying a weapon.

The area right next to the elevators seemed to be mostly personal items. Clothes, food, and an array of illegal weaponry beckoned the eye of the newcomer to Bazaar. Jewelry, likely stolen in pirate raids in Damien’s opinion, glittered from behind glass display cases under the eyes of heavily armed guards.