Starship's Mage: Episode 5 (6 page)

“Once we’re in range, pick a target and give her the full forward battery,” Wong ordered. “Rinse and repeat until we need to start shooting at the rock.”

“Gotcha.”

“How long to range?” Azure asked quietly and Wong shrugged.

“Five minutes for us to range on the hunters,” he said. “Eight for us to range on the station. If they have the same missiles as those shuttles, the hunters will range on us as we range on the station.”

“And Darkport?”

The asteroid flickered in Azure’s display as a highlight settled on it, marking the weapons bases they had identified so far.

“I expect them to have heavy ground-based missiles,” Wong admitted. “They’ll range on us when we range on them.”

Wong walked away from Azure, checking in on other stations as Azure began to run through the various displays on his chair’s console. One of the video feeds was from a recon drone that had settled in to watch the hangar bays.

Those doors stayed resolutely shut as the timer in the corner of the screen ticked down, and Azure was starting to wonder if the Falcones were planning on letting
anyone
out when Monroe’s sharp announcement cut through his thoughts.

“Range on targets, firing one through sixty,” he declared aloud. A moment later, the entire multi-million ton mass of the
Azure Gauntlet
shivered as her main weapons fired.

“Time to impact, seven minutes and counting,” the spectacularly haired gunner continued. “Time to reload, ninety seconds.”

“Bandits are firing!” another pirate tech suddenly announced. “I’m reading seventy-two missiles inbound, Phoenix VIIs.”

“I guess they’re feeling spendy on Falcone’s dime,” Wong told the bridge crew with a teeth-baring grin. “Monroe, keep pouring it on. Kelsier, run the turrets and keep us clear. Hu, if Darkport launches, I want to know
yesterday
.”

Azure sat back, watching the crew of his ship fight for him. There was little he could do other than watch his screens now.

Ninety seconds after the first salvos launched, Monroe sent a second salvo blasting into space. Twenty seconds after that, the hunters returned fire. Azure noted the slower reload time, but evaluating the competence of the hunter ships was outside his purview.

Before the third salvo launched, though, there was movement on the screen from his recon drone. He pinged the sensor tech immediately, in case Hu hadn’t seen it.

“They’re opening the hangar to release the freighters.”

“Keep your eyes peeled, that means the station is going to launch again!”

A third salvo blasted clear of the pirate cruiser, and Azure watched the scans of the ships fleeing Darkport carefully.

“Holy
mother of devils
,” a voice cut through the buzz of the bridge, and Azure’s gaze snapped to the sensor tech and the image on the screen.

“Darkport has launched,” Hu said in a dry voice. “I’m reading one hundred fifty – I repeat, one five zero – heavy missiles inbound.”

Azure looked at the screen, taking a moment to interpret the unfamiliar data codes.
Gauntlet
had fired more missiles than the asteroid so far – they had three salvos sweeping out at the Hunter ships, still with over three minutes to go before impact. The Hunters had fired almost as many, with two seventy-two missiles salvos blasting towards
Gauntlet
.

Even he knew that a single hundred and fifty missile salvo was a different kettle of fish.

“I see we’re earning our pay today,” Wong said after the sharp moment of silence. “Monroe, hold tubes fifty-one through sixty for counter-missile deployment. Begin transferring area denial munitions to those tubes.

“Kill me those Hunters, and then we’ll deal with Darkport,” the ex-Hunter ordered.

The external cameras on the bridge suddenly dulled, the computers auto-filtering as the first explosions began to light up the space around the stolen cruiser.

Lasers reached out from the Hunter’s modified yachts as well, and Azure almost immediately saw the difference between the
Gauntlet
’s
defenses and those of the essentially civilian ships. The
Azure Gauntlet
had dozens of Rapid-Fire-Laser-Anti-Missile turrets. The bounty hunter ships had a dozen apiece, and they were weaker and shorter-ranged than the
Gauntlet’s
as well.

“Got him!” Monroe shouted as his first salvo ran home. With four of the ships networking their defenses, Azure hadn’t been sure for a moment. Of the sixty missiles they’d fired, three made it through the gauntlet of coherent light to impact.

With eight hundred megaton antimatter warheads, three was more than enough.

Of the seventy-plus missiles the hunters had fired back, one made it past the lasers. The Mage at the amplifier flicked it away with ease, his eyes focused on the next salvo.

The second exchange ended the same way, another hunter ship dying in flame. The remaining two ships were withdrawing under the shield of the asteroids defenses now, though. The
Gauntlet
’s third salvo ran into a salvo of counter-missiles from the asteroid that
almost
saved them. Two missiles broke through, and then revealed that Monroe had perhaps grown cocky with his third round.

The missiles split at the last moment, each homing in on a different target. One missile slammed into each of the surviving hunter ships, and two separate explosions lit up the side of Darkport’s asteroid home.

“Brace yourself,” Wong ordered. With the last of the bounty hunters’ missiles gone, the first salvo from Darkport itself was inbound.

“Lord,” Hu interrupted Azure’s focus on the battle. He turned to face the small Asian woman who was running the sensors. “We can’t find the
Blue Jay
.”

“What do you mean?” Azure demanded.

“We’ve identified every freighter that has fled Darkport,” she told him. “Your target isn’t among them.”

“There’s no way they’d stay,” the Crime Lord objected. “They have to be there.”

“I know,” Hu said helplessly, clearly anticipating his anger. “We do not see her.”

Azure glanced back at the recon drone’s footage of the fleeing freighters. Each of them was now tagged with a name, clearly identified by the crew and computers. The
Blue Jay
wasn’t among them. There was a pattern, though, and he began to reach for it.

Then the entire ten-million-ton mass of the
Azure Gauntlet
leapt like a startled puppy and his screens crashed with the main bridge lights.

#

The lights flickered back on, along with Azure’s screen, after a few moments of pitch black. Some of the consoles stayed on through the blackout, providing an eerie light in the space that Azure was suddenly all-too-aware was basically a large steel coffin.

“What the hell was that?” he demanded.

“Emergency defense override,” Wong told him. “The ship diverted all available power to an electromagnetic weave in the hull that’s supposed to dissipate antimatter before it annihilates the hull.”

“That seems dangerous,” Azure observed dryly.

“We took three gigaton-range direct hits and we’re still here,” his ship captain told him brusquely. “I can live with the inconvenience. Damage report!” he bellowed at his staff.

“All three hit on quadrant two,” Monroe told him grimly. “We lost ten tubes and over a dozen laser turrets. Hull integrity… is holding.”

The mohawked pirate sounded surprised. Azure
was
surprised – three
gigatons
worth of explosions, and they weren’t even breached?!

“They built this ship tough,” Wong observed. “Ninety seconds to next salvo. Please tell me we’re targeting the launchers.”

“An entire salvo on its way, another launching shortly,” the gunner promised.

Leaving the battle in Wong’s capable hands, Azure turned back to the scan of the freighters and the pattern he’d noticed.

“Ship’s Mage,” he barked. He hadn’t actually learned which of the three was on duty. “Use the amplifier to scan this space,” he ordered, highlighting a region in the middle of the gaggle of fleeing starships.

A moment passed in silence.

“It’s there,” the Mage replied flatly. “That’s one
hell
of a thaumic signature – how come the sensors can’t see it?!”

“Because he’s shielding against those, and didn’t realize he’d stick out like a sore thumb to a Mage,” Azure told him calmly. “Montgomery’s a clever bastard. Wong – can he shield his jump signature?”

The Tracker faced the crime lord and shrugged. “Unlikely,” he told Azure. “A Mage remaining behind probably could, but I suspect he would like to leave with his ship.”

“Indeed,” Azure settled back in his chair. “Then once we have captured Darkport, he will be easy to pursue.”

Wong looked uncomfortable. Behind him, missiles exploded in space on the main screen as Darkport’s defenses began to shred the
Gauntlet’s
attack.

“That salvo hurt us,” he told Azure softly. “We’re down a
sixth
of our launchers – and we just got less than ten missiles through their defenses with
full
salvo.”

“Are you saying we can’t take Darkport?” the master of the Syndicate asked slowly, his voice cold.

“No,” Wong replied, his voice equally cold. “But we
will
have to close to amplifier range to do so now, which means we
will
get hurt by their missiles and lasers.

“If we take Darkport, my lord, we will not be in sufficient condition to pursue the
Blue Jay
,” the ex-bounty hunter laid out flatly.

“I recommend we wait until we have the scan of the
Jay
’s jump, and then jump out to our fall-back position. We will be able to make repairs and pursue your prey. We have three Jump Mages to their one – it will only take a few days at most to catch up and capture Montgomery.

“Then, with that bird in the hand, we can return and capture Darkport,” Wong concluded. “Every jump capable ship is in that flock of refugees. There will be no help for the Falcones – no reinforcements that can arrive before we return.”

“We can still have them both, my lord, but we must leave off the attack today.”

Azure turned away from his Captain, eyeing the asteroid ahead of them. Nine missiles had detonated on the rock’s surface, gouging massive chunks out of the planetoid and wiping away defensive weapons. Enough still remained that he believed Wong. If they took too much damage reducing Falcone’s defenses, they would lose the grand prize.

“Very well,” he replied. “But if we lose Montgomery, Wong…”

“We won’t.”

#

Damien struggled to maintain the cloaking spell. For the first time in a long time, it wasn’t his
power
that was the problem but his
concentration
. The spell wasn’t overly demanding in terms of energy and even his limited strength could handle it, but tracking all of the complex components of burying the
Blue Jay
’s energy signature in other ships took a lot of focus.

He’d had a moment of hope when he’d watched Darkport’s first missile salvo strike home, but when the radiation flare of the multiple antimatter explosions had faded, the massive Syndicate cruiser was still there, still advancing relentlessly on the station.

Around the
Blue Jay
, the other freighters were slowly beginning to scatter. Each of them had a different destination where they would try and lie low before rebuilding their business. Based off what he’d seen on Darkport, Damien couldn’t help but hope that most of them would fail and fall into Protectorate hands.

“Darkport is not winning this, Damien,” David said quietly over the bridge intercom. “Are we clear to jump yet? I don’t like
anyone
in this fight, but I’d like to be gone before Azure has time to hunt us.”

Still keeping most of his attention on the stealth spell, Damien checked the space around them. Were they this close to a planet, they wouldn’t have been able to, but Darkport had almost no gravity to warp the space flattened by the LaGrange Point.

For most civilian ships, a LaGrange Point wasn’t flat enough for jumping. Damien’s training suggested he had to be significantly further away from the gas giant than they were. With the amplifier, however, he should be able to push through.

“We’re clear.”

“Get us out of here,” David ordered.

Damien took a deep breath. Releasing the stealth spell, he reached for the magic of the amplifier again as quickly as he could, funneling it into the jump he’d prepared days earlier.

In a collapsing bubble of magic, the
Blue Jay
vanished from the center of the fleeing gaggle of freighters.