Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) (37 page)

“No, you don’t,” she agreed calmly. “You did, however, act as agent for Captain Rice to acquire a cargo of two
million
tons of aerospace craft and maintenance supplies, ground and aerial terraformers, and advanced farming equipment. Given that the
Jay
is capable of hauling
three
million tons of cargo, I can’t help but feel that you and the good Captain came to an agreement on what to do with that other million tons of cargo. A load of weapons, for example.”

“Such a contract would not be illegal on Amber,” Keiko pointed out. “I would have no reason to conceal such a transaction.”

“Please, Miss Alabaster,” Stealey said quietly. “I have spent the last ten years resolving rebellions in the Fringe. I know where the guns for the more moral ones are coming from. If you were less picky, you and I would have had a discussion a long time ago.”

That, finally, pierced the other woman’s armor of perfect calm. She obviously hadn’t realized the Protectorate knew about her little sideline.

“That is neither here nor there,” Keiko said slowly. “I did not engage the
Blue Jay
to haul a million tons of weapons, if that is what you’re asking.”

“I honestly don’t care if you engaged them to fight a fucking war for you,” Stealey snapped. “I care if you know where they went, and I know that you damned well know.”

Keiko’s hand smacked her desk with a resounding clap.

“This is Amber, my Lady Hand,” she said coldly. “Your authority here is not unlimited, and I will not be bullied. This interview is over.”

“Do not push me, Keiko Alabaster,” Alaura warned, her voice equally cold. “Amberites tend to believe their lack of laws limits the power of a Hand here – but this is a matter of
Protectorate
Law. In that, I am the highest authority outside of Sol. Did Rice even tell you why the Protectorate might be looking for them?”

“They broke his Mage out of one of your prisons that he’d been jailed in on trumped up charges,” Keiko said. “He was surprised there was no warrant for his arrest.”

It was an improvement, Alaura reflected, that the merchant was no longer denying she’d met Captain Rice.

“There are no warrants because I canceled them all,” she told the other woman. “The local Guildmaster didn’t understand what was going on, and handled it completely wrong. I’ve spent the last few months trying to
fix
that.”

“If the charges
were
trumped up, then just let them go,” Keiko snapped, and Alaura noted the flush in the Amberite’s cheeks. There was more going on here than just the usual stubbornness of Amber merchants or protecting a contract. This was… personal for Alabaster.

“I can’t, Miss Alabaster,” the Hand said finally, after a long silence. “The
Blue Jay
has been modified – her jump matrix has been turned into an amplifier.”

“That isn’t
possible
.”

“It is,” Alaura told her. “And those with the knowledge to judge such things tell me that the
Jay
could be used as a template to do that to
any
jumpship.

“In the hands of a pirate, that ship would allow them to produce an entire
fleet
of covert raiders, utterly indistinguishable from regular merchant ships until they unleashed magic on their unsuspecting prey. Can you imagine how bad our piracy problem would grow then?”

Alabaster’s face had grown even paler than before, and Alaura knew the merchant was imagining it just fine.

“The Blue Star Syndicate already wanted Rice dead,” she continued. “Now they know what the
Blue Jay
can do. They will hunt the
Jay
to the ends of the Protectorate – you can’t save them. I can’t protect them – not if I can’t
find
them.”

“They won’t be harmed?” Keiko demanded, suddenly and incongruously a young woman concerned for her friends. “Any of the crew?”

“I swear to you, upon the honor of Mars, none of the
Blue Jay
’s crew will be harmed,” Alaura told her. The Hands voice was firm as she made a commitment that bound not merely herself, but her King, and, in a sense, the
entire Protectorate
.

From Keiko Alabaster’s face, the other woman knew what it meant for a Hand to swear upon the honor of Mars.

“Excelsior, Lady Hand,” she finally admitted. “I sent them to the Graveyard at Excelsior.”

#

The
Blue Jay
jumped into Excelsior in the middle of the night Olympus Mons Time. Kelly had joined Damien in the simulacrum Chamber and was looking around wide-eyed as they emerged into the new system. The screens all around them began to fill with images as the
Jay
’s many cameras began to record the universe around them again.

“Well, we’re here,” Damien said quietly to the screen showing David on the bridge. The Captain nodded, checking something on his own screen.

“We’re about eight hours from the Trojan cluster we’re supposed to meet this Captain Seule at,” he told the Mage. “Keep an eye on things, this system has a
lot
of rocks floating about.”

The entire system looked odd, Damien realized. There were only four planets, for one thing – one tiny ball of fire-kissed rock tucked in right next to the star, one ball of ice light-hours out, and two mid-sized gas giants. Where orbital dynamics said there should be two more planets between the fire-seared inner planet and the innermost gas giant was two massive asteroid belts.

Both belts were clumped up, with most of the rocks concentrated in a single massive cluster for each. A navigation beacon announced the presence of a number of mining platforms on the outer of the two clusters.

“This place is weird,” Kelly said next to Damien. “Those asteroid belts make no sense.”

“That’s about what the first explorers who surveyed the system said,” David told the two youths. “A lot about the system didn’t add up, so they pulled some of the historical astronomical data for this region of space. Some oddities showed up in the late twentieth century data – which just gave them more questions!”

“Doesn’t look like this system has a lot of answers,” Damien said quietly, eyeing the local radar data also being fed to his screens. With the amount of debris in this system, it would be up to him and the
Jay’s
laser turrets to keep the ship safe.

“It doesn’t,” the Captain admitted. “But the Corporation that had purchased the mining rights wanted to make sure that if something had happened to create the strange asteroid belts, it wouldn’t repeat. They funded an expedition to go into deep space and capture the old light from Excelsior.

“They went almost two light centuries outside explored space,” he continued. “Dodging systems to avoid tempting fate, they went hunting what they figured was the death of a world.”

“Jumping from deep space to deep space, looking backwards the whole time?” Kelly said softly. “Sounds romantic.”

Damien was reminded that his girlfriend, as an engineer, had a strange definition of romantic.

“What they found wasn’t,” David said grimly. “It turns out that about six hundred years ago, a small black hole – a couple of earth masses, nothing more – ripped through the Excelsior system and tore the two middle world to shreds.

“They also discovered what no one had guessed before that – that Excelsior had been inhabited before that. A technic civilization, the only one we know of, had died when that black hole hit. They’d been a couple of centuries ahead of us – early twenty-second century in our nineteenth century – but without magic, they were unable to escape the death of their worlds.”

That got Damien’s attention. Humanity had discovered a total of five non-human intelligences. So far as the xeno-anthropologists could determine, all had lacked critical biological or mineral resources to achieve anything resembling civilization – all of them were still at the hunter-gatherer level. Now that David mentioned it, though, he vaguely remembered something about a dead technological alien race.

“A couple of space stations survived. Once we knew to look for them, we found them. One of the biggest had survived for almost a hundred years after the black hole before they finally died out from the inability to replace critical tech,” David finished. “No one has any idea what pathogens may be aboard, so even the archeologists are only allowed to study it with robots, and only for limited amounts of time. It’s under a quarantine order.”

Damien glanced at their course, towards the trailing Trojan cluster of the outer gas giant. He noticed, now, that there was a second navigation beacon there. One warning everyone away.

“That’s where we’re going,” he said quietly.

“Yeah,” David confirmed. “To the Graveyard of the only other technic civilization we’ve known.” He shrugged. “I’m prepared to bet any ghosts will like me though.”

“Why’s that?” Kelly asked, sneaking her hand into Damien’s. He squeezed, hopefully reassuringly, as he needed the reassurance himself.

“When they identified what had happened, the ship I was serving on in the Navy was part of a task group testing a theoretical way to break up a singularity threatening one of our systems. We took it as a sign of a good test subject.”

He smiled sadly.

“We know almost nothing about Excelsior’s inhabitants even now – but in a strange way, we avenged them.”

#

David was alone on the bridge for most of the approach to the trailing Trojan cluster of the third of Excelsior’s remaining planets. The cluster of asteroids followed the massive gas giant in the lull of gravity in the orbit, what was often called the Lagrange points after the eighteenth century mathematician who’d first theorized them.

After the first hour or so proved non-eventful, with the handful of rocks that had come their way readily handled by the
Blue Jay
’s defensive turrets, he’d even sent Damien to bed – though, from the way Kelly had dragged him from the simulacrum Chamber, he wasn’t sure the young Mage had got much
sleep
.

As they crept closer to the cluster of asteroids, thankfully, the ship slowly came awake around him and Jenna joined him on the bridge. For all of his brave words to Damien, David found the thought of entering the Graveyard discomfiting.

Part of the reason that the Protectorate had managed to swing putting the Graveyard off-limits was that the final desperate struggle to survive of Excelsior’s inhabitants had stripped the Trojan cluster of any useable resources – most specifically, potable water. Most of the rocks that followed Excelsior Three in its orbit were just plain rock now, where a cluster like this should have had ice asteroids and a few captured comets.

“There it is,” Jenna said quietly as they finished slowing to a crawl and began drifting into the cluster. In the center of the Lagrange point was the immense structure of the space station that had been the last, doomed, hope of an entire species.

It was possible, sort of, to identify the original mining platform at its center. Welded onto that pitted and ancient heart, though, were the remnants of transport ships, cargo containers, and even entire hollowed-out asteroids. It was dead and silent now, a monument in black iron and meteor pitted rock.

“There is a
lot
of debris out there,” Jenna said quietly. “It’s full of iron and heavy metals – pretty much every sensor we have is picking up nothing but static.”

“No one else can find
us
either,” David reminded her. “That’s why we’re here.”

“So, any idea where the
Luciole
is?”

“Keiko gave us a specific set of co-ordinates,” he said, typing them into the computer. A flashing sphere appeared on the main screen. “We’re to decelerate to zero relative to the Graveyard Station there, and wait for Seule to contact us.”

“I keep expecting ghosts to come jumping out of the shadows,” Jenna complained. “Why the hell are we meeting here?”

“Because nobody comes here except archeologists, and the latest expedition isn’t due in for eleven months,” David replied. “It’s a perfect place to hand over enough guns to conquer a world.”

Jenna shivered visibly. “Yeah, because
that
thought makes me more comfortable.”

The Captain shrugged as the
Blue Jay
entered the agreed co-ordinates, and the maneuvering thrusters brought the massive freighter to a halt relative to the ancient alien station. There wasn’t much he could say to Jenna beyond that he trusted Keiko, and he wasn’t even certain that was wise.

“Do you see anything?” he finally asked.

“Nothing,” his XO replied. “Damien?”

The Mage on the video link shrugged. “I can’t see anything the ship can’t,” he said dryly. “So right now, I’m feeling a bit blind.”

The
Blue Jay
’s bridge was silent, the two officers and the linked-in Mage all straining their own senses and the ship’s, trying to see
something
- anything.