Star Mage Exile Read online

  She hesitated.

  “We don’t have all day, Lin,” Tarsalan said, her heavy-lidded eyes drooping lower. The woman drummed fingers bearing thick, bejeweled rings on the desktop.

  “Around ten minutes before Captain Speidel gave the order to withdraw,” said Carina, “I was alone in a room. I think it might have been the ambassador’s office.”

  “What were you doing there?” Cadwallader asked.

  “Checking for insurgents, sir.”

  “Go on,” said Cadwallader.

  Carina explained how Lieutenant Torres died. “After the lieutenant fell, the enemy turned his weapon on me,” she went on. “He would have shot me too, except...”

  Her mouth was suddenly very dry. She swallowed.

  “Spit it out, Lin,” said Cadwallader, frowning.

  “Whatever you saw, or thought you saw,” said Speidel, “all you have to do is tell the truth.”

  Carina focused on the captain. “The soldier disappeared, sir. Right in front of me. One minute he was there and the next he was gone.”

  Tarsalan gave a huff of bitter frustration. “Just like the others. This is ridiculous.”

  “We have the body cam vids,” said Cadwallader. “They don’t lie.”

  “It was an optical illusion,” said Tarsalan.

  “All fourteen of them?” Cadwallader asked.

  “It makes no sense otherwise,” Tarsalan countered. “If someone’s invented cloaking technology for individuals, why didn’t they use it when they attacked? Why use it in order to retreat, especially when by all accounts they had the upper hand?”

  “I don’t think it was cloaking technology,” said Cadwallader. “I think it was something else.”

  “Like what?”

  The lieutenant colonel was about to reply but he noticed that Carina was there, still standing to attention.

  “You’re dismissed, Corporal,” he said.

  Carina saluted and left. She guessed her story backed up the testimony given at earlier debriefings. She hadn’t been singled out for scrutiny, but Cadwallader’s comment that the soldiers’ disappearance had been something else had her stomach in knots again.

  The sound of fast-moving footsteps from behind made her stop and turn. It was Captain Speidel, striding quickly to catch up to her.

  “We’re going in the same direction,” he said. “Let’s walk together.”

  As a subordinate, Carina’s compliance was a given. The two continued on their way.

  “How are things going for you?” Speidel asked.

  “Pretty good, sir.”

  “You can drop the sir for the moment, Carina.”

  “Okay.” Speidel had talked with her in this friendly way fairly regularly since recruiting her to the merc company, and she enjoyed their amiable conversations.

  “I wanted to give you a heads up,” Speidel went on. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Stop a moment.”

  Carina turned to him.

  The man’s expression was serious and pained. “You can’t tell anyone else what I’m about to say to you. I can trust you, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Why am I even asking?” Speidel smiled. “You’re tighter than a drum.” He checked up and down the empty corridor. “I wanted to let you know, things might be over soon for the Black Dogs. We might be disbanding. So if you come across an opportunity to do something else, you should probably take it.”

  “Disbanding, s...?” She stopped herself just in time. “Why?”

  “Tarsalan’s been complaining for a while now that she’s pouring creds into the company and making no profit. This last job we just did might be the final straw. The client’s refusing to pay the balance of the fee because the embassy was taken.”

  “But they lied,” Carina exclaimed. “We were on our own and totally outnumbered. We could never have defended the place. If we hadn’t withdrawn, we would have been slaughtered.”

  “That’s not what they’re saying at their end. But it doesn’t matter what they say. If they won’t pay, they won’t pay.”

  “Maybe Tarsalan should send us on a mission to persuade them,” Carina said bitterly. Working with the Black Dogs was her life. She didn’t know what else she could do. She was damned if she would join the military and get paid a pittance.

  Speidel gave a wry smile. “That might be effective one time, but as soon as word got out we’d never work again. It isn’t like merc bands are difficult to find these days.”

  “So you’re saying I should sign up with another company?”

  “I don’t know. Soldiering’s a tough life. Maybe you should try something different while you’re still young and it isn’t burned into your bones. The galaxy’s a big place. There has to be some way for a young woman to make a living that doesn’t put her life on the line. You aren’t dyed-in-the-wool military like most of the rest of us.”

  Carina shook her head. “Fighting’s all I know.”

  Speidel sighed and resumed walking. Carina went along with him.

  “I sometimes wonder if I did the right thing,” Speidel said, “breaking up that fight you were in and signing you up as a merc. You might have ended up doing something less dangerous and more worthwhile.”

  “No. I wasn’t gonna win that fight. I took two of them out, but I was five minutes from being beaten to a pulp. If you hadn’t stepped in...” Carina’s memory of the event was vivid. Though she’d learned her fighting skills the hard way over the previous six years since Nai Nai died, even she was no match for the five boys who had set upon her. Their motive was only to have some fun, it seemed, as she had nothing to give them. It was a heavily bruised, bleeding Carina that Captain Speidel had brought back to Duchess and patched up. “Well, I wouldn’t be here now, that’s for sure.

  “If you take my advice,” Speidel said, “you won’t be here for much longer.” The captain’s comm button chirped. He checked the message. “Looks like my dinner will have to wait. Think over what I said, Carina. It might be time for a change.”

  As the captain turned to go back the way he’d come, Carina thought she saw a look in his eye that indicated he knew more than he was saying. She felt sick. Had the captain’s friendly advice been a cover for a deeper warning? Had he guessed her secret, and did he think that others were also drawing closer to the truth about what had really happened in the embassy fight?

  Perhaps it was indeed time for her to move on.

  Chapter Four

  None of Carina’s bunk mates had returned to the shared cabin, so she took advantage of the rare moment of solitude to meditate. Nai Nai had taught her the habit, telling her that it preserved and strengthened one’s powers.

  The old woman had said that though mage abilities were genetically inherited, it wasn’t a fixed thing like hair or eye color. Casting was also a skill that had to be learned, refined, and maintained, and she’d explained that if Carina didn’t regularly perform mental exercises, her ability would lessen and perhaps fail. What was more, if she did lose her ability, there was no guarantee that it would ever return once she was an adult, no matter how hard she worked.

  Sitting in her top bunk, Carina crossed her legs and faced the wall. The steps to achieve a trance state were always the same. She mentally recited and embraced the concepts of the five Elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, water. Following the Elements were the Seasons: spring, early summer, late summer, autumn, winter. This second part of the pre-trance task was not so familiar to Carina. Though she’d visited many worlds while working with the merc band, she’d never encountered a place where the climate followed the pattern laid out by Nai Nai with its types of weather, variations in temperature, and fluctuation of daylight hours.

  Next, she mentally wrote the Strokes. Each line had to be written perfectly, each taper and flourish correct. She wrote them separately and then together in the character that meant forever. Finally, she conjured up the Map in her mind. Nai Nai had made her draw the 3D image over and over again on her holoscribe whil
e she was growing up. There were more than a hundred stars, and her grandmother would measure the angle and distance between each star carefully when she finished. If anything was incorrect, she had to draw it again.

  The Map showed the birthplace of their clan, Nai Nai had said. At the center of the Map was the star system that their ancestors had been driven from, so long ago that no one knew when.

  Carina had once asked her grandmother why they didn’t try to return to their original home.

  “No one knows where to go anymore, Mei Mei. No one remembers where we came from.”

  “But we have the Map,” Carina had persisted. “Why can’t we find it using that?”

  Nai Nai had laughed and dipped her hand into a jar of sand she used for polishing the beautiful stones she sold for a living. She scattered the sand across the floor where Carina sat.

  “Tell me, Mei Mei, how many grains do you see?”

  Carina frowned. Was it a test? “Ten thousand? No. Fifty thousand.”

  “Probably about five thousand. Look closely, child, and imagine these are stars. In our section of the galaxy alone there are ten times as many stars as there are grains of sand lying here. It would take several lifetimes to visit each and check if the surrounding pattern of stars matched the Map. One would need to look at the groupings from many orientations. And our galactic sector is only one of thousands.”

  The young Carina eyed her holoscribe drawing, which had taken her over two hours to create. “Then why bother remembering it at all? Why not give up on ever returning home?”

  “That is something every mage must answer for herself. But let me ask you, little one, do you feel as though this place where we live now is your home?”

  Carina considered their two-roomed house, which in truth was little more than a shack. She considered the dirty street outside with its open gutter that kept the local rats well fed. She considered how different she felt from the other children, who didn’t know the Elements or the Seasons or the Strokes or the Map, and who could not cast. She shook her head. “I don’t, Nai Nai.”

  The old woman sighed. “My great-grandparents told me once they’d heard it said that our birthplace was the origin of humanity itself—the world where humans first evolved, invented space travel, and journeyed out to colonize new planets. If we could find that place again, it would truly be something very special.

  “But more important even than that, the Map gives us hope,” her grandmother continued. “we are exiles and our clan has been scattered to the stars. Nowhere are we accepted for being who we are. We live in secrecy, always. The Map holds the promise that one day we may live openly and together again in our homeland. Holding onto that possibility helps us to go on.”

  Remembering Nai Nai’s words calmed Carina’s anxiety a little, and she slipped into a deep meditative state.

  Some time later, the sound of the cabin door opening entered the edge of her consciousness. She brought herself out of her trance and turned to see Thyrna Atoi, her bunk mate, bend down to sit on the lower bunk. She began to take off her boots.

  “You missed dinner,” said Atoi. “Not that you missed much. Chef’s on a marine plant kick. Yeuuuch! It’s high in nutrients and protein, he said whenever anyone complained.”

  “I wasn’t that hungry anyway,” Carina said.

  Atoi threw a boot at the corner of the room. “Got it!”

  “What was it?” Carina asked. “A roach?”

  “Yep,” said Atoi as she went across the room to retrieve her boot. She picked up the squashed insect by a leg and carried it to the garbage disposal chute.

  “That’s not a roach,” Carina said. “That’s a scalobite.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Scalobites are good. They eat roaches.”

  “Whatever. Now it’s a dead scalobite.”

  Carina sighed and lay on her back. The bunk shuddered as Atoi shifted her position. She was a large, heavily muscled woman.

  “You missed the announcement too,” she said. “Got another mission. Hykara sector.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Don’t know. A long way from here. We’re fast-burning through the quiet shift.”

  As Atoi mentioned the fast burn, Carina began to feel the vibration of Duchess’ engines powering up. She lay down and fastened the safety webbing over her bunk. Soon, the ship would lurch as they switched to FTL drive.

  “What’s the mission?” Carina asked, studying the rust patch in the corner of the ceiling above her bunk.

  “Search and rescue. Kidnap victim.”

  “Huh? Isn’t that one for a planetside control force?”

  “You’d think, wouldn’t you?” Atoi replied. “Word is, no one local will touch it. Other mercs won’t touch it. We’re only doing it because it’s that or disband. Tarsalan says she’ll pull the plug otherwise.”

  Unfastening her webbing temporarily, Carina leaned over the edge of her bunk to look at Atoi. The woman had the satisfied expression of someone spinning out a juicy piece of gossip.

  “What else does the word say?” Carina asked.

  Atoi smirked. “The boy who was kidnapped is a Sherrerr, and the kidnappers are—”

  “Dirksens,” Carina finished for her. She threw herself onto her back. “We’ve bought it.”

  “Yeah. Everyone’s trying to bail but Tarsalan won’t let them. Says they have to work out their contracts. No negotiation. After the last mission, people were already pissed. Some chairs got thrown, tables broken. Tarsalan exited at the first sign of trouble and left Cadwallader and Speidel to calm things down.”

  Carina could imagine the scene. She was glad she’d skipped dinner. Merc bands were mostly made up of men and women who had left—or been discharged from—the military because they were unstable or lacked the discipline necessary for service in the forces. They could be aggressive, anti-social, impulsive, and belligerent.

  Her soldier buddies’ personality quirks had never bothered Carina much. Surviving alone on the streets from a young age had brought her into contact with many unsavory types. In fact, the mercs’ unpleasant characteristics made things easier for her. Superficial friendships and casual hookups were all she could risk in terms of relationships. In her time with the Black Dogs, she’d only ever contemplated something more with one man: Stevenson, the shuttle pilot, who was relatively sane. She’d avoided him ever since coming to the realization.

  No, mercs were not to be messed with, and Tarsalan, in her usual nonchalant, disinterested manner, had just told a room of them that their next mission was to be even more suicidal than their last.

  Chapter Five

  As Carina went to the armory to suit up before leaving on the mission to rescue the little Sherrerr boy, she was reconsidering her decision to go along. Speidel had advised her to move on from the merc band, and she had recently come dangerously close to revealing her ability. What was more, the assignment was highly risky. Even if they succeeded—which wasn’t likely—the chances were that the Dirksens wouldn’t rest until it found and punished the people responsible for thwarting their plan. And in the list of possible punishments the Dirksens meted out, the best and rarest option was a quick death.

  Despite Tarsalan’s threats, there wasn’t much the company owner could do to the mercs who refused to take part in the assignment other than fire them. Being let go was a problem that paled in comparison to the potential consequences of defying the Dirksens.

  The Sherrerr/Dirksen feud was notorious. It had gone on for so long, the inciting event was lost in time, but the reason for their mutual hatred and constant clashes didn’t matter. The Sherrerrs and Dirksens were equally wealthy, powerful, and corrupt, which meant that their rivalry to be the ruling clan in that sector of the galaxy was inevitable.

  Anyone with any sense had nothing to do with either family if they could help it. It was true that when you were on the inside, you had access to all the luxury and privilege the connection provided, but there was a l
arge drawback: you could never leave. Once you were in, you were in for life and that was that. If you left, you were an unacceptable liability, and you would spend the rest of your prematurely shortened life looking over your shoulder, wondering where and when the blow would fall.

  Carina guessed that the Sherrerrs had promised Tarsalan rich rewards and lifelong protection for her and her loved ones to persuade her to take the deal. The same recompense and safeguarding wouldn’t apply to the grunts who did the actual work.

  The mercs who had refused the job were dumped on a remote planet, unpaid. The rumor was that Speidel had threatened to resign, though for some reason he was now coming along. Perhaps his motivation was similar to Carina’s. She certainly had no interest in the clan feud or in incurring the vengeful spite of the Dirksens, but she had thought more than once about the little boy they had taken.

  According to the information the Sherrerrs had given, he was only six. Carina had been but four years older when she had also found herself alone with no one to protect her, and she hated to think how the ruthless Dirksens might treat a Sherrerr they had in their clutches. No ransom note had been issued, and no other explanation had been given for the kidnapping, so what they were planning to do was unclear.

  Someone had to get the boy out. Carina had done some morally questionable things during her time as a merc. If rescuing an innocent child was to be her last mission, it would be a fitting finale to her career.

  The armory was already busy with the rest of the mission squad. She took down the legs of her armor and stepped into them, tightening the fit before slotting the torso into place and sealing it. The arms came next. She slipped the canister of elixir into its pouch and adjusted its position so that it wasn’t in the way. From the edge of her vision she noticed Smitz watching. She gave him the stink eye and bent down to pick up her helmet.

  “Hey, what are you doing, you bunch of useless grunts?” asked Captain Speidel as he appeared at the door. “Didn’t you hear the directive? If we go in there dressed like soldiers, we’ll be blown to bits before we get within five klicks of the target. You’re in civvies for this. And no guns. We don’t want to draw any attention when we disembark. We’ll buy weapons planetside. Get changed and get to the shuttle. We’re leaving at eleven hundred and fifteen.”