The pilot, p.4
The Pilot, page 4
I’d seen one woman start bleeding from the eyes when she tried to violate a corporate NDA by signing a stronger contract, as the second wizard hadn’t designed the spell properly.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to clearly analyze the magic circle Solstice had used through Omega’s feed, because he hadn’t been in place while the spell was cast. I had to move carefully, as I was effectively guessing.
I preferred to work around contract spells when possible rather than confronting them directly, but I felt pressure to move fast.
The longer we spent there, the farther away my father got.
And the more likely Solstice was to bomb us. But that didn’t scare me too much.
Finally, I improvised a spell I thought should work, and I surrounded Doctor Oladyne with three floating spell-circles of pure white.
Just in case, I tested the waters with some innocent questions. “Do you know what I’m going to ask you?”
“Hngh?”
I repeated myself patiently, and the second time, Oladyne slurred an answer: “Solstice.”
“That’s right. How many people were at the meeting.”
“Seven. And the guards too. Do they count?”
“Who invited you?”
Oladyne clumsily tapped the side of his head. “Voice called me. Said he was a Zenith Device.”
I drummed my fingers on my thigh. Technically, I could rig up a makeshift truth spell out of pathfinding and sealing magic, but that method had a lot of holes and I didn’t think it was necessary.
He didn’t have the presence of mind to lie. I had to keep shaking him back to awareness.
“Did you recognize anyone else?” I asked.
“Your father. The Vice Chief. Wait…what about the spell? I can’t talk about this.”
“Why did they want you?”
Oladyne’s eyes crawled around the room as though trying to place himself. “Fabricators. They said I’d be working with Fabricator Technicians, but that’s all I know.”
“Why join Solstice?”
He coughed out a laugh. “They’ll make me richer than you. Besides, even if I wanted to say no…”
Doctor Oladyne trailed off and lost his train of thought. I glanced up to Mell. “Do you have a medical bot with you?”
“Not that he—kshzzzzt—DESERVES IT, but here.” Mell twitched a little as she reached into a pocket of her white coat and pulled out an uneven metal ball that unfolded into a tiny Nova-Bot.
It scurried up his shoulder and jabbed him with a syringe, but I called Horizon to take me away.
Doctor Oladyne had been a stooge, but I’d learned enough from him to start my brain moving. I didn’t intend to waste whatever time it took him to recover.
I had another captive to question.
The Vice Chief of Fathom’s Planetary Security had once been an officer in the Union military, but she’d been behind a desk for twenty years. She’d put on quite a few extra pounds and wore expensive jewelry to accentuate her tailored suit.
Which had been an exceptionally poor decision that day, given that her hidden Solstice safe room was in a desert.
I would have started sweating the moment Horizon’s teleportation dropped me off if it hadn’t been for my mantle. Sola’s combat armor was temperature-regulated, and she showed no discomfort whatsoever as she kept her rifle trained on the Vice Chief.
Our captive wasn’t as nervous as I’d expected her to be. Her plush chair had been destroyed, the power was deactivated in the building, and a hole had been torn in her ceiling, letting in sunlight.
Instead of cowering in fear, she was wincing up at the sun and shading her eyes with her hand. “I’m just saying that it wouldn’t hurt to have this conversation in my ship. My drones are doing their best, but there’s only so much they can—Who’s this? Hello?”
Drones carrying fans split out of the way so the Vice Chief could get a clear look at me, and her eyes opened wider when she did. “Ah! The young Captain Vallenar! I just met…well, I guess I can’t say, can I? But I think you know who it was.”
With a few magic words, I cast the same spell that I had on Doctor Oladyne. Three magic circles spun around her head, temporarily locking out the effects of Solstice’s contract spell.
“Don’t worry, you can talk freely now,” I said.
Sola lifted her gun slightly. “And I’d recommend that.”
“What do you expect me to say?” The woman shifted in discomfort beneath the harsh sun, but Sola didn’t let her squirm away. “I told your tall, silent friend already. It’s not like I know anything.”
“You’re calm for someone at gunpoint,” I said.
She let out a heavy breath. “It’s a nice show, but you’re not going to shoot me.”
Sola turned her green visor to me before returning it to her target. “Ma’am, you have been badly misinformed.”
“I don’t think so, but I’ll put it another way. Solstice needs me. And that means that every time you touch me, a piece of your lives goes crumbling away.” She brushed away some sand that had trickled from the hole in the ceiling. “I wonder which of your friends have already disappeared just for the discomfort you’ve put me through.”
That didn’t line up with what I knew of the organization.
In terms of temperament, she was describing them perfectly, but only if she was one of the real members of Solstice’s upper echelon. If she had been one of them, she wouldn’t have attended a meeting where the Zenith Processor vetted new recruits and set a trap for The Last Horizon.
If she really mattered, we wouldn’t have seen her at all.
“Has this happened before?” I asked curiously.
The Vice Chief gave a mysterious smile that was somewhat spoiled by the fan-bearing drone passing in front of her face. “People think twice before they cut me off in traffic. Now, let’s all board my ship, and we can talk about how to mitigate this disaster you’ve brought upon yourselves.”
I scratched my head. “Sola?”
Sola shot her.
She was using impact rounds with the power on the weapon cranked all the way down—a setting designed for subduing boarders on a ship without risking collateral damage—but the gunshot was still loud and shocking, and the woman doubled over, wheezing and hacking.
I knelt beside her. “I don’t think you’re really as important to Solstice as you say you are, or we wouldn’t have captured you. But you’ve gotten my hopes up. Maybe you have something to tell us after all. If you do, you’d better give it to us now, before they shut you up.”
The Vice Chief’s coughs gradually transformed into harsh laughter. “I’m going…to watch…you die.”
“We need to get her off planet,” Sola said. She was peering up through the hole in the ceiling, checking for newcomers.
I grabbed the woman with my levitation ring. My magic circles still orbited her upper body, and her fan-drones continued to buzz as they flew. “Unlock your starship for us, Vice Chief, so we can get you out of the system before your own people kill you.”
The woman laughed and spat something uncomplimentary.
“Too late,” Sola said. “We have incoming. Horizon, we’re engaging.”
A shadow blotted out the sunlight spilling in from the broken ceiling, and the Vice Chief raised a hand. “Get them!” she crowed.
The building shook as the hangar next door exploded. I extended my protection amulet to cover my passenger, and it kept out even the cloud of dust. When we could see again, Sola was already gone.
“My ship!” the Vice Chief said angrily. “I’m going to make you pay for that.”
I considered loosening my protection so she could choke on the cloud of dust, but I still needed her to talk.
“We’re not the ones who blew it up,” I said. That should have been obvious, but she wasn’t thinking too clearly. “You think they cared if you were onboard or not?”
“We know everything,” she responded. Her mysterious affect was somewhat spoiled by the buzzing fans of the drones.
I marched through the newly created entrance between the meeting-room and the hangar, shoving aside debris with my levitation ring. With my other hand, I drew my Lightcaster Four.
“If you really knew everything, you’d know you can’t win a fight,” I said.
I looked up to the Solstice starship in the bare desert sky. I expected them to be deploying soldiers, or at least to fire their weapons again. Instead, they began to lazily gain distance.
A message blinked in my vision, and I activated it with a thought. It was a processor call from Sola, purely audio.
“They have hostages, Captain,” Sola said. “That’s not a bomber, it’s a civilian shuttle. I can’t shoot the ship down.”
“It dropped a bomb,” I pointed out.
“They shoved it out of the cargo hatch. And I’m reading…Biohazard! Captain, I think they deployed a virus.”
I dropped my gun and pulled my wand. My mantle would be fine, but its magic only protected me, and my amulet couldn’t do anything against disease.
I had barely begun casting when blood started running from the Vice Chief’s nose. Her eyes had turned red, and she looked up at me in horror.
I chanted some quick seals, but before I had completed the incantation, I noticed the preexisting circles from my anti-contract spell flickering.
That bomb had released both an engineered bioweapon and a measure of magic-dispelling mist. It wouldn’t threaten me, but it delayed my spells enough to stop me from saving the Vice Chief.
She spasmed in the air, slowly drifting down as the effects of my levitation ring faltered. When she hit the ground, motionless, she was leaking blood from all over her face.
A heavy clunk announced Sola’s arrival. “I let the ship leave, but I tagged it.”
“Good. We wouldn’t get anything out of it. This is one of their usual tactics; they take over a ship and use it to deliver an agent or a payload, but it’s not one of theirs. The passengers probably don’t even know they deviated.”
As I spoke, I stared into the dust still swirling around the edges of my protective amulet. It was a little closer than before, thanks to the anti-magic particles, but I could still keep it off indefinitely.
Anger boiled in my heart.
That was the Solstice I remembered.
Sola was kneeling by the Vice Chief, peeling the woman’s console off her wrist and searching her pockets. “I’ll take this back to the ship, see if it gives us more than she did.”
I pushed down my anger and gave her a nod, calling to Horizon.
One last visit.
Omega lounged in the corner, loudly chewing gum and spinning a handgun around his finger. “They folded like laundry, Captain! Collapsed like a cheap colony! Washed out like a stain!”
I didn’t feel any more sympathy for the First Director of the Magic Tower than I had for the Vice Chief, but that didn’t mean I liked staying in a room filled with bodies. It was too much like being in an Iron Hive.
“Get off the—"
“Ruptured like a faulty Drive! They died, that’s what I’m saying, Captain.” A mouth formed on a tendril extending from his shoulder and laughed.
“Get off their bodies,” I finished.
He jerked up as though suddenly realizing he had been lounging on the back of the piled-up mages from the Magic Tower. “Worlds above and worlds below! That was downright disrespectful of me, wasn’t it, Captain? Terrible, terrible, terrible.”
“Tell me what you learned.”
“That you need to teach classes on self-defense. They don’t make mages like they used to.”
“Noted. What else?”
Omega’s Aethertech eye flashed. “These guards weren’t from the Magic Tower, not at all, they just dressed up like it. They were released from an Advocate lockup after we—how do I put this delicately?—slaughtered all the Advocates in their home.”
“We didn’t slaughter the Advocates.”
“Not for lack of trying!”
I was trying not to sigh. The best way to get Omega down to business was to push through; any reaction on my part would only bait him. “What were their magic disciplines?”
“Mind magic.” He flashed me a broad grin. “Isn’t that interesting, Captain? The redhead here,” he nudged a body with a foot, “was an enchanter captured for making cursed jewelry that ensnared the minds of those who wore it! And our other new friend was an alchemist arrested for mental stimulants.”
“Illegal enchantments aren’t automatically curses,” I said. “But never mind that.”
“I didn’t bring it up,” Omega pointed out.
“The First Director was a famous Archmage of transmutation. He could transform objects into almost any other material. You see the pattern here, right?”
“I see two patterns here, Captain, and they’re so troubling. I’m troubled.” Omega held up one finger. “Solstice is gathering a fabricator Technician, three mages who specialize in making things, and your father, who’s famous for making things into more things.”
He ticked every point off on another finger, until I wasn’t even sure what he was counting anymore.
“Is that the first pattern?” I asked. It wasn’t hard to put together, and I was already starting to run down the potential identities of the enemies we hadn’t identified.
“It is the first pattern! Here’s the second, and it’s disturbing me because they’ve already broken it.” His smile vanished. “Why didn’t they kill the Technician?”
My mind skidded to a halt and reversed course. As it did, Omega continued talking.
“I was here first, and I killed the wizards fast, so no need to silence anyone. But they hijacked a civilian ship to get to the Vice Chief in a desert, if I’m to believe you. Our Engineer and the good doctor are in a populated area, but nothing has come for them. Why not?”
I mentally signaled my processor to call Horizon. “Mell, did you read that?”
“I never left the ship,” Mell responded immediately. “My decoy-bot is piloting Oladyne out on a private shuttle. They might get caught on the way out, but…” I heard her shrug. “…who cares?”
The easiest answer was that Doctor Oladyne didn’t have any information Solstice minded us knowing. I’d already determined for myself that he wasn’t as well-informed as the Vice Chief.
“Mell, let’s leave the Doctor on the planet,” I said at last. “At least until we can scan him a little better.”
“Sure, fine with me. I’ll park the shuttle and get rid of the decoy-bot.”
In the moment I wasn’t paying attention, Omega lunged forward to loom over my shoulder. “What are you thinking? That he’s a saboteur? A spy? That they might track him to our priceless ship?”
“That we shouldn’t let someone onboard when he might be affected by mind spells.” Solstice had no qualms throwing people away, and we knew they were working with at least three mind-altering mages. Better to be safe.
My console buzzed, and I tapped to answer the call. Mell’s face popped up on the screen, which tended to have a more reliable connection than calling a processor directly.
Mell was rubbing her face beneath her glasses. “The second I put the shuttle down, the doctor jumped on my decoy-bot and self-destructed. He’d been surgically implanted with an explosive device.”
I frowned as I considered the implications. “They had time to put him through surgery? Why would they go that far? It’s not as though they could have expected us to capture him.”
“From what I know of Doctor Oladyne and the circles he ran in, he might have had it installed himself. They just pulled the trigger.”
“Do you think they blew your dad up?” Omega whispered into my ear.
I slid him away from me with my levitation ring. “Since he’s an Archmage of a valuable spell and the president of one of the largest corporations in the galaxy, I doubt it. The Iron King didn’t kill him, so I can’t think Solstice would.”
“You need to do something about his tendency to get kidnapped.” Omega shook his head sadly. “Can’t leave him alone for an hour, can you?”
“He wasn’t kidnapped,” I said. “When he was taken by the Iron Legion, I couldn’t imagine him cooperating willingly. With Solstice…” I sighed. “He probably offered his help.”
Omega held up a pistol and tapped it against his own forehead. “I’d like to offer him my own.”
“Not yet. We don’t have so many leads we can afford to shoot them in the head.” I thought for a moment. “Also, he’s still my father. Nobody shoots him before I do.”
Omega swiveled his head around one hundred and eighty degrees. “You hear that, everyone? The Captain called dibs.”
“Mell, get back aboard and start working on the Vice Chief’s console,” I ordered. “Everybody else, look into Solstice however you can. The moment you have something, let me know and I’ll verify with magic.”
Raion popped up on the screen, beaming. “I won’t let you down, Captain!”
I’d forgotten about Raion. I couldn’t imagine him as an asset to any clandestine investigation, and there was a non-zero chance he would end up accidentally bursting into Solstice’s headquarters alone.
“I have a special mission for you, Raion,” I responded quickly. “Your Divine Titan is still under repair, isn’t it? I need you to help Doctor Cryce. Let’s get that operational as soon as we can. Get Shyrax to lend you some Technicians if necessary.”
Raion nodded. “Yes, sir! I’ll repair it to a thousand percent!”
That only worried me more.
FOUR
Back on his ship, Benri Vallenar thought back to his time with the Iron King. He’d been kidnapped and forced to witness as a catastrophically powerful hive-mind had devastated the galaxy, all because of his unique magic and his connection to Varic.
He had both of those to thank for his latest opportunity. Unlike the previous incident, he was going to use those connections to his benefit.
He was certainly far better prepared. For one thing, he’d left his real body behind.
Nila was sweating as she inspected the autopilot, looking for signs of tampering. Their ship had joined the usual stream of traffic leaving the planet, and Planetary Security had no reason to stop them.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to clearly analyze the magic circle Solstice had used through Omega’s feed, because he hadn’t been in place while the spell was cast. I had to move carefully, as I was effectively guessing.
I preferred to work around contract spells when possible rather than confronting them directly, but I felt pressure to move fast.
The longer we spent there, the farther away my father got.
And the more likely Solstice was to bomb us. But that didn’t scare me too much.
Finally, I improvised a spell I thought should work, and I surrounded Doctor Oladyne with three floating spell-circles of pure white.
Just in case, I tested the waters with some innocent questions. “Do you know what I’m going to ask you?”
“Hngh?”
I repeated myself patiently, and the second time, Oladyne slurred an answer: “Solstice.”
“That’s right. How many people were at the meeting.”
“Seven. And the guards too. Do they count?”
“Who invited you?”
Oladyne clumsily tapped the side of his head. “Voice called me. Said he was a Zenith Device.”
I drummed my fingers on my thigh. Technically, I could rig up a makeshift truth spell out of pathfinding and sealing magic, but that method had a lot of holes and I didn’t think it was necessary.
He didn’t have the presence of mind to lie. I had to keep shaking him back to awareness.
“Did you recognize anyone else?” I asked.
“Your father. The Vice Chief. Wait…what about the spell? I can’t talk about this.”
“Why did they want you?”
Oladyne’s eyes crawled around the room as though trying to place himself. “Fabricators. They said I’d be working with Fabricator Technicians, but that’s all I know.”
“Why join Solstice?”
He coughed out a laugh. “They’ll make me richer than you. Besides, even if I wanted to say no…”
Doctor Oladyne trailed off and lost his train of thought. I glanced up to Mell. “Do you have a medical bot with you?”
“Not that he—kshzzzzt—DESERVES IT, but here.” Mell twitched a little as she reached into a pocket of her white coat and pulled out an uneven metal ball that unfolded into a tiny Nova-Bot.
It scurried up his shoulder and jabbed him with a syringe, but I called Horizon to take me away.
Doctor Oladyne had been a stooge, but I’d learned enough from him to start my brain moving. I didn’t intend to waste whatever time it took him to recover.
I had another captive to question.
The Vice Chief of Fathom’s Planetary Security had once been an officer in the Union military, but she’d been behind a desk for twenty years. She’d put on quite a few extra pounds and wore expensive jewelry to accentuate her tailored suit.
Which had been an exceptionally poor decision that day, given that her hidden Solstice safe room was in a desert.
I would have started sweating the moment Horizon’s teleportation dropped me off if it hadn’t been for my mantle. Sola’s combat armor was temperature-regulated, and she showed no discomfort whatsoever as she kept her rifle trained on the Vice Chief.
Our captive wasn’t as nervous as I’d expected her to be. Her plush chair had been destroyed, the power was deactivated in the building, and a hole had been torn in her ceiling, letting in sunlight.
Instead of cowering in fear, she was wincing up at the sun and shading her eyes with her hand. “I’m just saying that it wouldn’t hurt to have this conversation in my ship. My drones are doing their best, but there’s only so much they can—Who’s this? Hello?”
Drones carrying fans split out of the way so the Vice Chief could get a clear look at me, and her eyes opened wider when she did. “Ah! The young Captain Vallenar! I just met…well, I guess I can’t say, can I? But I think you know who it was.”
With a few magic words, I cast the same spell that I had on Doctor Oladyne. Three magic circles spun around her head, temporarily locking out the effects of Solstice’s contract spell.
“Don’t worry, you can talk freely now,” I said.
Sola lifted her gun slightly. “And I’d recommend that.”
“What do you expect me to say?” The woman shifted in discomfort beneath the harsh sun, but Sola didn’t let her squirm away. “I told your tall, silent friend already. It’s not like I know anything.”
“You’re calm for someone at gunpoint,” I said.
She let out a heavy breath. “It’s a nice show, but you’re not going to shoot me.”
Sola turned her green visor to me before returning it to her target. “Ma’am, you have been badly misinformed.”
“I don’t think so, but I’ll put it another way. Solstice needs me. And that means that every time you touch me, a piece of your lives goes crumbling away.” She brushed away some sand that had trickled from the hole in the ceiling. “I wonder which of your friends have already disappeared just for the discomfort you’ve put me through.”
That didn’t line up with what I knew of the organization.
In terms of temperament, she was describing them perfectly, but only if she was one of the real members of Solstice’s upper echelon. If she had been one of them, she wouldn’t have attended a meeting where the Zenith Processor vetted new recruits and set a trap for The Last Horizon.
If she really mattered, we wouldn’t have seen her at all.
“Has this happened before?” I asked curiously.
The Vice Chief gave a mysterious smile that was somewhat spoiled by the fan-bearing drone passing in front of her face. “People think twice before they cut me off in traffic. Now, let’s all board my ship, and we can talk about how to mitigate this disaster you’ve brought upon yourselves.”
I scratched my head. “Sola?”
Sola shot her.
She was using impact rounds with the power on the weapon cranked all the way down—a setting designed for subduing boarders on a ship without risking collateral damage—but the gunshot was still loud and shocking, and the woman doubled over, wheezing and hacking.
I knelt beside her. “I don’t think you’re really as important to Solstice as you say you are, or we wouldn’t have captured you. But you’ve gotten my hopes up. Maybe you have something to tell us after all. If you do, you’d better give it to us now, before they shut you up.”
The Vice Chief’s coughs gradually transformed into harsh laughter. “I’m going…to watch…you die.”
“We need to get her off planet,” Sola said. She was peering up through the hole in the ceiling, checking for newcomers.
I grabbed the woman with my levitation ring. My magic circles still orbited her upper body, and her fan-drones continued to buzz as they flew. “Unlock your starship for us, Vice Chief, so we can get you out of the system before your own people kill you.”
The woman laughed and spat something uncomplimentary.
“Too late,” Sola said. “We have incoming. Horizon, we’re engaging.”
A shadow blotted out the sunlight spilling in from the broken ceiling, and the Vice Chief raised a hand. “Get them!” she crowed.
The building shook as the hangar next door exploded. I extended my protection amulet to cover my passenger, and it kept out even the cloud of dust. When we could see again, Sola was already gone.
“My ship!” the Vice Chief said angrily. “I’m going to make you pay for that.”
I considered loosening my protection so she could choke on the cloud of dust, but I still needed her to talk.
“We’re not the ones who blew it up,” I said. That should have been obvious, but she wasn’t thinking too clearly. “You think they cared if you were onboard or not?”
“We know everything,” she responded. Her mysterious affect was somewhat spoiled by the buzzing fans of the drones.
I marched through the newly created entrance between the meeting-room and the hangar, shoving aside debris with my levitation ring. With my other hand, I drew my Lightcaster Four.
“If you really knew everything, you’d know you can’t win a fight,” I said.
I looked up to the Solstice starship in the bare desert sky. I expected them to be deploying soldiers, or at least to fire their weapons again. Instead, they began to lazily gain distance.
A message blinked in my vision, and I activated it with a thought. It was a processor call from Sola, purely audio.
“They have hostages, Captain,” Sola said. “That’s not a bomber, it’s a civilian shuttle. I can’t shoot the ship down.”
“It dropped a bomb,” I pointed out.
“They shoved it out of the cargo hatch. And I’m reading…Biohazard! Captain, I think they deployed a virus.”
I dropped my gun and pulled my wand. My mantle would be fine, but its magic only protected me, and my amulet couldn’t do anything against disease.
I had barely begun casting when blood started running from the Vice Chief’s nose. Her eyes had turned red, and she looked up at me in horror.
I chanted some quick seals, but before I had completed the incantation, I noticed the preexisting circles from my anti-contract spell flickering.
That bomb had released both an engineered bioweapon and a measure of magic-dispelling mist. It wouldn’t threaten me, but it delayed my spells enough to stop me from saving the Vice Chief.
She spasmed in the air, slowly drifting down as the effects of my levitation ring faltered. When she hit the ground, motionless, she was leaking blood from all over her face.
A heavy clunk announced Sola’s arrival. “I let the ship leave, but I tagged it.”
“Good. We wouldn’t get anything out of it. This is one of their usual tactics; they take over a ship and use it to deliver an agent or a payload, but it’s not one of theirs. The passengers probably don’t even know they deviated.”
As I spoke, I stared into the dust still swirling around the edges of my protective amulet. It was a little closer than before, thanks to the anti-magic particles, but I could still keep it off indefinitely.
Anger boiled in my heart.
That was the Solstice I remembered.
Sola was kneeling by the Vice Chief, peeling the woman’s console off her wrist and searching her pockets. “I’ll take this back to the ship, see if it gives us more than she did.”
I pushed down my anger and gave her a nod, calling to Horizon.
One last visit.
Omega lounged in the corner, loudly chewing gum and spinning a handgun around his finger. “They folded like laundry, Captain! Collapsed like a cheap colony! Washed out like a stain!”
I didn’t feel any more sympathy for the First Director of the Magic Tower than I had for the Vice Chief, but that didn’t mean I liked staying in a room filled with bodies. It was too much like being in an Iron Hive.
“Get off the—"
“Ruptured like a faulty Drive! They died, that’s what I’m saying, Captain.” A mouth formed on a tendril extending from his shoulder and laughed.
“Get off their bodies,” I finished.
He jerked up as though suddenly realizing he had been lounging on the back of the piled-up mages from the Magic Tower. “Worlds above and worlds below! That was downright disrespectful of me, wasn’t it, Captain? Terrible, terrible, terrible.”
“Tell me what you learned.”
“That you need to teach classes on self-defense. They don’t make mages like they used to.”
“Noted. What else?”
Omega’s Aethertech eye flashed. “These guards weren’t from the Magic Tower, not at all, they just dressed up like it. They were released from an Advocate lockup after we—how do I put this delicately?—slaughtered all the Advocates in their home.”
“We didn’t slaughter the Advocates.”
“Not for lack of trying!”
I was trying not to sigh. The best way to get Omega down to business was to push through; any reaction on my part would only bait him. “What were their magic disciplines?”
“Mind magic.” He flashed me a broad grin. “Isn’t that interesting, Captain? The redhead here,” he nudged a body with a foot, “was an enchanter captured for making cursed jewelry that ensnared the minds of those who wore it! And our other new friend was an alchemist arrested for mental stimulants.”
“Illegal enchantments aren’t automatically curses,” I said. “But never mind that.”
“I didn’t bring it up,” Omega pointed out.
“The First Director was a famous Archmage of transmutation. He could transform objects into almost any other material. You see the pattern here, right?”
“I see two patterns here, Captain, and they’re so troubling. I’m troubled.” Omega held up one finger. “Solstice is gathering a fabricator Technician, three mages who specialize in making things, and your father, who’s famous for making things into more things.”
He ticked every point off on another finger, until I wasn’t even sure what he was counting anymore.
“Is that the first pattern?” I asked. It wasn’t hard to put together, and I was already starting to run down the potential identities of the enemies we hadn’t identified.
“It is the first pattern! Here’s the second, and it’s disturbing me because they’ve already broken it.” His smile vanished. “Why didn’t they kill the Technician?”
My mind skidded to a halt and reversed course. As it did, Omega continued talking.
“I was here first, and I killed the wizards fast, so no need to silence anyone. But they hijacked a civilian ship to get to the Vice Chief in a desert, if I’m to believe you. Our Engineer and the good doctor are in a populated area, but nothing has come for them. Why not?”
I mentally signaled my processor to call Horizon. “Mell, did you read that?”
“I never left the ship,” Mell responded immediately. “My decoy-bot is piloting Oladyne out on a private shuttle. They might get caught on the way out, but…” I heard her shrug. “…who cares?”
The easiest answer was that Doctor Oladyne didn’t have any information Solstice minded us knowing. I’d already determined for myself that he wasn’t as well-informed as the Vice Chief.
“Mell, let’s leave the Doctor on the planet,” I said at last. “At least until we can scan him a little better.”
“Sure, fine with me. I’ll park the shuttle and get rid of the decoy-bot.”
In the moment I wasn’t paying attention, Omega lunged forward to loom over my shoulder. “What are you thinking? That he’s a saboteur? A spy? That they might track him to our priceless ship?”
“That we shouldn’t let someone onboard when he might be affected by mind spells.” Solstice had no qualms throwing people away, and we knew they were working with at least three mind-altering mages. Better to be safe.
My console buzzed, and I tapped to answer the call. Mell’s face popped up on the screen, which tended to have a more reliable connection than calling a processor directly.
Mell was rubbing her face beneath her glasses. “The second I put the shuttle down, the doctor jumped on my decoy-bot and self-destructed. He’d been surgically implanted with an explosive device.”
I frowned as I considered the implications. “They had time to put him through surgery? Why would they go that far? It’s not as though they could have expected us to capture him.”
“From what I know of Doctor Oladyne and the circles he ran in, he might have had it installed himself. They just pulled the trigger.”
“Do you think they blew your dad up?” Omega whispered into my ear.
I slid him away from me with my levitation ring. “Since he’s an Archmage of a valuable spell and the president of one of the largest corporations in the galaxy, I doubt it. The Iron King didn’t kill him, so I can’t think Solstice would.”
“You need to do something about his tendency to get kidnapped.” Omega shook his head sadly. “Can’t leave him alone for an hour, can you?”
“He wasn’t kidnapped,” I said. “When he was taken by the Iron Legion, I couldn’t imagine him cooperating willingly. With Solstice…” I sighed. “He probably offered his help.”
Omega held up a pistol and tapped it against his own forehead. “I’d like to offer him my own.”
“Not yet. We don’t have so many leads we can afford to shoot them in the head.” I thought for a moment. “Also, he’s still my father. Nobody shoots him before I do.”
Omega swiveled his head around one hundred and eighty degrees. “You hear that, everyone? The Captain called dibs.”
“Mell, get back aboard and start working on the Vice Chief’s console,” I ordered. “Everybody else, look into Solstice however you can. The moment you have something, let me know and I’ll verify with magic.”
Raion popped up on the screen, beaming. “I won’t let you down, Captain!”
I’d forgotten about Raion. I couldn’t imagine him as an asset to any clandestine investigation, and there was a non-zero chance he would end up accidentally bursting into Solstice’s headquarters alone.
“I have a special mission for you, Raion,” I responded quickly. “Your Divine Titan is still under repair, isn’t it? I need you to help Doctor Cryce. Let’s get that operational as soon as we can. Get Shyrax to lend you some Technicians if necessary.”
Raion nodded. “Yes, sir! I’ll repair it to a thousand percent!”
That only worried me more.
FOUR
Back on his ship, Benri Vallenar thought back to his time with the Iron King. He’d been kidnapped and forced to witness as a catastrophically powerful hive-mind had devastated the galaxy, all because of his unique magic and his connection to Varic.
He had both of those to thank for his latest opportunity. Unlike the previous incident, he was going to use those connections to his benefit.
He was certainly far better prepared. For one thing, he’d left his real body behind.
Nila was sweating as she inspected the autopilot, looking for signs of tampering. Their ship had joined the usual stream of traffic leaving the planet, and Planetary Security had no reason to stop them.
