It was only when Kiera finally stopped and sighed that her bodyguard finally said anything.

  “I think our shortcut has gone a bit astray, hasn’t it, Your Majesty?”

  Kiera gave Lawrence a dirty look.

  “Why is it that you only call me that when you think I’m being silly?” she asked.

  “Because sometimes I have to remind the young woman I am charged to protect that she is also the ruler of basically every human being alive,” the Guard said calmly. “Some silliness is required for you to be human, but we need to avoid risks.”

  Kiera snorted and brought up the map in a holographic projection above the wrist-comp. Tracing her route with her other hand, she sighed.

  “Missed the turn here.” She tapped the spot. “We’re under one of the condo terraces, at least fifty meters in the wrong direction.”

  “Okay. A bit more of a walk, then. Can we keep the map up this time?” Lawrence asked.

  “Sure,” Kiera conceded with a chuckle. A green line flashed into existence on the display, marking her route toward the shuttle bay. “We have time, but I didn’t plan on getting lost.”

  Lawrence, in what Kiera recognized as a great feat of patience, said nothing.

  The corridors they were traversing weren’t empty, but there were few enough people moving through the workspaces of the ship that Kiera had the opportunity to place each one as they passed.

  She knew all of the Royal Guard and other Mages on the ship by face and name, and knew most of the crew and her security detail by face at this point. She’d put a lot of effort into building that skill over the years.

  Kiera’s title came with power and authority, but all of that only mattered so far as the people around her supported her. As a Rune Wright, she had Runes of Power inlaid across her body that dramatically expanded her magical power—but even her magic only meant so much.

  To be the Mage-Queen of Mars, she needed people she trusted and who trusted her. More, she needed people who encountered her to come away with a positive impression, the feeling that their Queen respected and valued them.

  That the cold-blooded strategy inherent in that lined up perfectly with her natural inclinations was handy.

  Still, she had a moment of surprise when a stranger stepped around a corner and her Gift instantly identified them as a Mage. But she didn’t recognize the lanky young man. He was wearing a crew shipsuit and vanished around another corner almost before she was sure she’d seen him, leaving her staring after him for a few seconds.

  “Kiera?” Lawrence said. “What is it?”

  “I thought I knew every Mage on the ship,” Kiera replied, focusing as she locked the stranger’s face into her mind. “But I just saw a Mage member of the crew that I don’t think I’ve even met.”

  It was a nice face, she noted absently as she completed the not-quite meditative trick that stored the face in her memory palace. But if he was a Mage, she should have known him.

  “Security breach?” Lawrence asked, her tone soft and concerned.

  “I don’t think so?” Kiera said. “Feel free to double-check things, of course, but I think he’s crew. Just…Captain Salonen made a point of introducing me to his Ship’s Mages, and I didn’t think there were any other Mages aboard.”

  “Entertainer? I’ll have someone check the crew list,” Lawrence said firmly, then chuckled. “Of course, there is another possibility, my Queen.”

  Kiera glanced at her companion, realizing she’d stopped in the middle of the corridor.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your Testers used runic artifacts designed by your great-grandfather to identify Mages,” Lawrence murmured. “But they are an attempt to duplicate your natural ability as a Rune Wright. It’s possible that you have sensed someone as a Mage who the Test missed.”

  Kiera whistled softly.

  “That’s a headache I hadn’t thought of,” she admitted. “If the Test is missing any Mages, though, that’s a problem.” She shook her head. “I’ll think on it. Check that list.

  “For now, I still want to go look at shinies!”

  In hindsight, she was realizing that putting all ten of her suitors into a single dinner might have been a foolish idea.

  7

  Barry was well aware that the last thing he needed was to run directly into the Mage-Queen of Mars. If someone put together the fact that the Queen didn’t know who he was with the fact that he was supposedly aboard as one of her guests, he’d be in serious trouble!

  He hadn’t been expecting her to be slumming it down in the working sections of the ship, though, and had relied on a uniform stolen out of a storage locker to avoid attention.

  Long practice and repeated success told him that the best way to move through any workspace was to dress like a low-level laborer and look busy. His stolen shipsuit would get him most places in the base of the ship, though his need to hack through security doors would draw attention if he wasn’t careful.

  Trying to slow his breathing and focus on the task at hand, he ducked into a quiet supply closet. Blinking away the moment, he checked the burgeoning Empire of Greater Luxembourg in his game. A few commands assigned resources to stabilizing the western front, where the English were trying to retake their French holdings from his mercenary armies—and helped calm his nerves.

  His map told him that he was close to the main shuttle bay. Unless he was mistaken, though, that was where the Mage-Queen and her terrifying red statue of a bodyguard had been headed. Maybe she was meeting one of her guests?

  Barry didn’t know. He did figure that trying to hack into the flight-control center of a shuttle bay while a Royal Guard was standing right there ranked somewhere between suicidal and just phenomenally stupid.

  Fortunately, Extravagant Voyage was designed to not need access to an orbital. She was currently docked with one, with both personnel tubes and cargo umbilicals linking the spacecraft to the f-Signs space station, but the design criteria meant she actually had six shuttle bays. Two major ones, at the “north” and “south” compass points of the circular ship, and then four smaller ones equally offset from each other around the rim.

  The one closest to him was right next to the station, which should mean that it was shut down and quiet right now. For his purposes, that was perfect.

  The shuttle-bay doors were open when Barry reached them, which was sufficiently odd that he tucked himself into a corner to try to get a decent look at what was going on. He could hear faint conversation in the hangar area, but it sounded like the speakers were at the far end.

  There might be people there, but it was still quieter than the main shuttle bay and remained his best option. A touch of magic swirled around him, drawing the shadow with him as he darted through the open bay doors and into a corner of the space.

  The two big shuttle bays easily filled the full forty-meter height of the base, basically taking the form of forty-meter-wide caves a third of the ship’s diameter deep. The secondary bays, like this one, were far smaller structures. The entrance was a fifteen-meter square on the outer hull, and the shuttle bay held those dimensions for its full thirty-meter length.

  It was enough space to hold two or three smaller standard shuttles and still allow for one to land. There currently weren’t any spacecraft in the bay, but several cargo containers—the smaller standardized units that fit inside the big interstellar shipping units—were stacked up neatly in the middle.

  “Any problems?” a voice said, clear now that Barry was inside the hangar bay.

  Also clear, he realized, because the speaker was new and had just entered the room behind him. With a shiver, he pulled his magical shadow tighter around himself as he realized just who was speaking.

  The man who’d followed him in wore the uniform of a Royal Martian Marine Corps Mage-Major. A fully trained Marine Combat Mage likely wouldn’t even register the amount of effort it would take them to kill or capture Barry himself.

  Four other men, in the same crew shipsuits Barry wore, were maneuvering a new container in to join the rest.

  “None,” one of them said. There was something ever so slightly off about his voice to Barry. “Your local contacts delivered the container as promised. We’d already temporarily disabled the detectors, so no one who wasn’t in the loading tube even knows the container came aboard—and we’re the only ones who were there.”

  Someone was smuggling something aboard the Mage-Queen’s transport? That sounded like a terrible idea to Barry, though he assumed that the presence of a senior officer of the Mage-Queen’s detail meant it was only so underhanded.

  “Good.” The Major strode forward, running his hand through close-cropped black hair as he studied the four longshoremen.

  “Take this.” He produced four sheets of paper. “They show where to put the cargo throughout the ship. Once you’re done, destroy the paper. Return to your quarters and take these.”

  The Marine handed out something Barry couldn’t see from his vantage point.

  “Your service to humanity will be remembered,” he told the four crew. “Let’s get to work.”

  The crew got to work opening the container they’d just brought in, and the Major stood watching them.

  Barry found himself walking a razor’s edge between being terrified of being discovered—ending up in the hands of the Martian Marines would not end well for him right now!—and his inability to just wait.

  He cast his attention around the shuttle bay, looking for his original target. The main flight-control offices were in the two main hangars, but even this space needed… There.

  It was more of a cubby off the side of the hangar than an actual office, but it would have a console with a hard connection to the flight-control network. He didn’t really need the flight side of things—not yet, anyway—but it would also tell him which shuttles were where.

  On top of letting him find his target, combining access through the surveillance network with access through the flight network would almost certainly give him enough vectors to break in to the main administrative system.

  He wouldn’t have control of much—he needed to be right on top of things to make his particular combination of coding and magic work to break security—but he’d be able to observe everything.

  Right now, though, he realized he was already plotting a path across the shuttle bay that would get him into the cubby without entering anyone’s line of sight. His shadow cloak wouldn’t do much to conceal him in areas that, well, didn’t have any shadow.

  When the Marine officer finally made an approving noise and turned crisply on his heel to exit the bay, Barry sighed in relief. He hadn’t been able to route around the Mage, and the Mage was the last person he wanted to spot him.

  Keeping his magic wrapped around him, he began the painfully slow process of sneaking across the bay. It was straightforward enough, helped by the fact that the four laborers working on the cargo seemed oddly oblivious to everything around them.

  As he reached his destination, he glanced back to see just what they were smuggling aboard the ship. The container was only about half-full, but the four boxes the crew were maneuvering were still large enough to be awkward.

  Barry’s curiosity forced him to creep back a few steps as the first box slid onto a transport pallet. It was roughly the size of four coffins bundled together, a solid-looking secured transport crate.

  There was no company name or logo on the crates. There had been some kind of label, but someone had painted over it. Whatever the containers held, someone had wanted it to be unobtrusive.

  If he hadn’t just seen a Marine taking charge of the delivery, Barry’s moment of concern would have been stronger. He could think of four or five different ways he could draw attention to the crates without getting caught—but they weren’t without risk.

  And since the Mage-Queen’s people clearly knew what was going on, he focused on what was in front of him.

  Tucked behind the console where no one entering the shuttle bay could see him, he used his magic to connect a cable from his wrist-comp to the console. He’d set up a wireless link later, but wires were always easiest to start with.

  For whatever reason, it was a lot easier for him to magically influence technology through a wire than a wireless network.

  By the time Barry had carved his way through the security protocols on the flight-control network, the four crew had departed, each pushing one of the big crates on a portable pallet jack.

  Finally alone, he dropped his cloak of shadow and pulled the data up on the console. As he’d already figured out, Shuttle Bay Charlie was serving as a main cargo-access point with a heavy umbilical connected to f-Signs.

  Shuttle Bays Alpha and Bravo both had lists of shuttlecraft stored aboard. Alpha was what he expected—luxury shuttlecraft, smaller versions of the Courvoisier he’d stolen for Waxer last time.

  Bay Bravo, though, had clearly been taken over by the Queen’s detail. The security codes that tried to keep him from seeing what was there barely slowed him down before he pulled the list. Every occupant of Bay Bravo was military, assault shuttles with the gear to drop from orbit and take out armored bunkers before delivering exosuited solders into the wreckage.

  “That’s not a bad fallback,” he murmured to himself. It wasn’t often that assault shuttles were in civilian areas, and he’d never even had an opportunity to test his skills against military hardware.

  He was confident that he could break open the security on even the brand-new Model Twenty-Four-Sixty-Five assault shuttles in Extravagant Voyage’s hangar. But while they were valuable, they weren’t his target, and he quickly pulled the lists for Bays Delta, Echo, and Fox.

  Between the console and his corneal projector, he had all six shuttle lists up, and he stared at them grimly for a few seconds.

  Charlie, as he could see with his own eyes, was empty. Delta held a pair of medium-lift cargo shuttles—not the big craft that hauled interstellar shipping containers to and from planetary surfaces but solid utility ships with internal cargo bays. Echo, like Charlie, was facing toward f-Signs and had been emptied.

  Fox held a trio of lighter personnel shuttles that looked like they didn’t even have the legs to make it to a planet and back. Literal touring shuttles, he realized, intended to take the passengers close to interesting sights and places.

  What wasn’t on any of the lists was a modified heavy-lift utility hauler. The ship he was looking for was the type that hauled ten-meter-by-ten-meter-by-hundred-meter interstellar shipping cargos to and from planets.

  It would fill most of one of the secondary shuttle bays. It definitely wasn’t in Charlie.

  So, either it wasn’t aboard the ship…or it was in Echo. And Echo, it looked like, was right next to the secondary security hub that ship’s security had been exiled to.

  They would love to catch someone the Mage-Queen’s security had missed. He needed time to put together a plan of attack.

  Plus, whether he was stealing the jump shuttle or an assault shuttle or even one of the luxury craft in Bay Alpha, he needed to wait until Extravagant Voyage was clear of Tau Ceti f.

  Sixteen hours from when they powered up the engines until they jumped. He figured he needed three hours to make sure everything was the way he needed.

  Dinner and departure were in two hours…and that meant that Barry had at least twelve hours to sort out his plan of approach.

  8

  Kiera was not consciously obsessed with prestige and presentation. She was capable of using them as tools when she needed to, but she tried to keep herself grounded and use simpler tools and places where she could.

  Of course, everyone around her had extremely solid opinions of what was fitting for a person of her eminence. And she was far from immune to the attractions of luxuries and views.

  All of which combined to put her first-night dinner with her selected suitors in the Diamond Room, a transparent-walled private dining area at the absolute peak of Extravagant Voyage’s central spire.

  From there, they could see all of the dome with ease and could look up to see Tau Ceti f hanging above them. It was an incredible view, especially as Voyage began her journey away from the planet.

  The Tau Ceti System had a lot of loose debris, the result of some ancient cataclysm or failure to form. Both habitable planets had fortress formations positioned ahead of them in their regular orbits, the Impact Defense Platforms tasked with keeping Tau Ceti’s people safe from meteors and asteroid impacts.

  But those diffuse clouds of debris and chaos created a glorious mix of light and not-quite-smoke scattered across the skies.

  The view was amazing. The food was incredible.

  Unfortunately, all ten of Kiera’s dinner companions appeared to have been struck dumb by the prospect of eating a full meal with her. None of the ten had been this quiet during the thirty-minute introductions she’d first met them in, but all seemed intimidated by the more intimate setting.

  As the main course was cleared away, she glanced around the room, inspecting her guests. None of the ten Mages in the room were lacking in confidence, she was certain, but something about this setup was intimidating them.

  “Was there a memo I missed about not talking in the Diamond Room?” she asked with a soft smile. “I don’t think I grew any extra heads since I met each of you on the surface, but everyone has been very, very quiet.”

  She got some chuckles and sheepish looks in response to that, but it still took a few moments before any of them spoke up.

  The one who did was the only Mage by Right in the room. Upton Ayaan Meical McGregor’s parents must have been absolutely delighted when their second son tested as a Mage as a pre-teen.

  The McGregors were fabulously wealthy entertainment tycoons who, among other things, ran the water, land, air, and space race industry in Tau Ceti. Of their four children, only Upton was a Mage—one of those flukes of genetics that came along every so often—and he’d thrown himself into being as skilled a Mage as his elder brother was an engineer and manager.

 

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