Empty jesters, p.12
Empty Jesters, page 12
“We… could… free the pirates.”
“How?”
Eric considered. OK. This was just planning. He tentatively assigned Plan A status to his next words. “Well, magic to get them out of that prison Drascz made. Then, we just bring them to their ship, tell them to reconsider their life choices, and shoo them away while no one’s looking?”
“And when your sister finds out?”
“I tell her the truth.” He offered a tentative smile.
“Do you feel good about that plan?”
Did he? Eric paused and examined his physical state. His breathing had calmed. He didn’t feel so angry and frustrated. “I think so.”
Charlotte squeezed him tight. “Eric, you are too powerful, too good inside, to allow yourself to be bullied into going along with acts you cannot abide.”
Eric took her by the hand and towed her toward the door with a renewed spring in his step. “Come on, before I lose my nerve. We can—oof.”
Despite a casual slap of the door panel as he approached, the door failed to open. He gave it a nudge with magic, and it grated open.
“You’ll need to apologize to whoever is in charge of fixing things around here.”
“Trebla. And yeah, I’m used to apologizing to him. It’ll be good practice for the apology I’m going to need for Jessie.”
One of these days, Jessie was going to need to get around to having proper uniforms made. Until then, most of her official comms would be voice-only. Her contact at Freeride Trade Security and Customs was no exception. She reclined in her command booster seat as she arranged a prisoner transfer.
“Yeah, total of nine. Two different vessels. Six from the Or Not to Be, believed to be part of the Poet Fleet. Three picked up from the wreck of the Slasher.”
“And your text comm says you have logs to prove these allegations of piracy?” Major Tennant inquired on the other end of the connection.
“Yeah. Septis Colony can confirm the kidnapping and identity of the victim as well as the ship that disabled one of their patrol ships. For the Slasher, yeah, I’ll forward logs. Just so you know what you’re seeing, they took a pot shot at us, and our hit to their engines took out 80 percent of their hull. Just… you know… so we’re clear on the tactical situation.”
“Understood, Arete. You don’t have to worry about us trying to stop that thing. You be willing to testify at the tribunal if I can guarantee you safe passage to the surface and back?”
A lump caught in Jessie’s throat.
Was she?
If they changed their minds and arrested her for piracy—or any of a number of other crimes across Earth-dominant space—then it would be up to Grosstet and the rest of her crew to enact an extraction. Or hold the whole planet hostage, if they got up the nerve to threaten an orbital bombardment.
“I’ll demur, Major. The evidence can stand on its own merits. Short of an imperial pardon I don’t see forthcoming, I’ll keep a wall of H-tech between me and anyone with arresting authority in Earth space.”
“H-tech, huh? That what you’re calling it?”
“Suits on Phabian came up with it, not me. Now, we got a deal, or haven’t we?”
“We’ll take the prisoners and evidence. Not sure why you’re bothering though. Open and shut case. Caught red-handed. Open an airlock in neutral space and it’s a victimless crime.”
“I’m an independent operator. I’m not taking on the role of judge or jury out here, just Good Samaritans taking in pirates when we find them. I’ll leave justice in the hands of elected officials.”
“Copy that, Ramsey. For what it’s worth, word’s getting around about you. A lot of us appreciate your contribution to galactic stability.”
“Thanks. Arete out.” She ended the comm. “Asshole. I bet he’d love my head on a spike on Pirates’ Row.”
Someday, she’d set foot on a planet again. But not Freeride. Not while some asshole wizard was parading around as emperor. Not while she was worth an early retirement and a private moon to whoever turned her in.
Ugh.
That just reminded her that she needed to smooth things over with Eric. He had the patience of a puppy. It would totally be an Eric move to run off and refuse to go along with Jessie’s self-appointed mission if he couldn’t live within her rules. And on his own, his magic would only go so far to protect him. He was too trusting and too damn soft to stay alive, free, and ahead of pursuit on his own.
All she had to do was judge the right amount of time to let him cool off before he’d be ready to listen to reason. A couple hours. Maybe less if he got down for pancakes before Uom’pe ran out or they got cold. They’d come out particularly good.
“Hey! Look who it is!” Captain Houston called out as Eric entered with Charlotte at his side.
“Shut it, the lot of you,” she snapped. “This is a mission of mercy. Captain Ramsey has decided to turn you over to authorities on Freeride, not Phabian.”
“WHAT?”
A hue and cry rose from the prisoners. They shouted and complained and talked over one another in a torrent of gibberish. None of it would have fit even a generous definition of “shutting up.”
“We’re getting you out of here,” Eric explained. “If you can be quiet.”
The pirates’ commotion died down.
“What about us?” asked one of the pirates from the other cage.
“We’ll take ’em,” Captain Houston offered. “Always use a spare hand. Whatever keeps the noose on the shelf.”
“Sort it out in the black,” Charlotte told them. “Eric. If you’ll do the honors. Oh, and before a single one of you gets the idea to try anything, this is the ship’s wizard. He’s got a conscience, but he’s no pushover.”
“You sure?” Captain Houston asked, dripping skepticism.
“I’m not letting Jessie turn you over to Freedride. I am going to let you out of those cages. After that, you can board your ship and sneak away to reconsider your life choices. Or…”
“Or…?” Charlotte prodded.
He needed a threat. It needed to sound scary enough for them to take the smart way out of this rather than trying to take them as hostages. “Or I turn you off like a light switch, one by one.”
Captain Houston leaned away from the steel mesh. Maybe he hadn’t sounded mean enough. Before he could try again with a little more menace, Charlotte stepped in once more. “See sense, Corbin. Take a message back to the admiral. I’m not playing her game. I’m free of her. If I ever hear from her again, it better be instructions on how to meet up with Wizard Patroclus so he can rid me of these.” Charlotte lifted her forearms, letting loose sleeves drop away to reveal the rune-etched bracers.
“Stand back,” Eric advised.
Once the pirates were well clear, Eric stepped up to the mesh. Noticing the bottom edge wasn’t welded to the floor, he tested it with the toe of his shoe and felt a little give.
Boing…
Boing…
On the third press, he let up his foot. Like the window shades at Aunt Rhi’s house, the metal rolled up to the ceiling with a sharp snap, spinning several times before coming to a halt.
The pirates looked on in amazement.
Charlotte harrumphed softly. “Told you as much. Now get moving.”
“What about us?” the other pirates demanded.
They had a simple door. At the hooking of a thumb, Eric sent it flying.
They were eleven on the way to the lift. A stampede of pirates and pirate-liberators. Eric ran at the fore and set them a slow and measured pace, all things considered. He had little doubt that any of the pirates, or even Charlotte, could easily outrun him if that had been the goal.
But they needed him.
He knew the ship.
Egad, they were doomed—they needed Eric to know the ship.
Luckily, no one said anything as the lift provided him a pictographic map and a picture of the domed hangar with the Black Ocean just below it. Eric tapped that, and the lift hummed.
A short while later, the doors slid open again, and the pirates gaped anew at the size of the indoor space.
“Go on. Get to your ship,” Eric urged them.
“Which one?” asked one of the newer batch of pirates.
One of the crew from the Or Not to Be jerked his head. “Follow us.”
Eric let them get ahead as he and Charlotte lagged behind.
“You have a plan to get them out?” she asked, voice lowered.
“Yeah, but nobody’s going to like it.”
She smiled. “I will. Whatever gets them out of here relatively unharmed. I don’t want my freedom served with a bucket of blood dolloped onto my hands.”
Captain Houston stood at the ramp to his little ship, pinwheeling an arm to shoo everyone aboard. Once the last of the pirates was inside, he hopped down and approached the two wizards. “Miss Charlotte—Wizard Charlotte, you’ve got to come with us. It’s going to be hides if we’re lucky, lives if the admiral’s off her mood.”
“I’m not going. End of story.”
Muscles in the man’s jaw clenched. Eric could see he was debating action. He stepped in front of the pirate captain. The two locked glances. Only for a fraction of a second. It was enough.
Corbin Houston, captain of the Or Not to Be, ran shrieking into the ship as one of his people powered the engines. The ramp lifted behind him.
“They’re probably looking for us to open that big hatch in the floor. Any ideas on how we might manage?”
Eric walked up to the hull of the Or Not to Be. “Nope.” He laid a hand on the pockmarked metal.
And just like that, the Or Not to Be… wasn’t.
“What just happened? I… I haven’t felt much in the way of magic since getting these stuck on,” Charlotte declared, holding up her bracelets again. “But I felt that.”
So had about half the lights in the hangar.
“Where did they go?”
“Nowhere.”
She stepped up beside Eric and reached out a tentative hand as if expecting to touch an invisible hull. Gears turned. Her narrowed gaze was shrewd. “When are they?”
Eric shrugged. “Dunno. Forward. Not too far, unless I botched it, which isn’t out of the question. But Jessie won’t know where and when to look for them. They’ll poof out, probably be dead in space for a while, then limp back to wherever they were headed.” He gave a moment to consider, then nodded firmly. “Yeah. They’ll be fine.”
Jessie hadn’t been off the comms for five minutes when she received an intraship from Chik-ta. At first, she thought the garbled nonsense was some kind of error in the system, but then the in-tik translator kicked in.
“Captain Ramsey, we have a problem.”
Jessie rubbed a palm across her forehead, seeking to quell the rising headache she felt coming. “You’re going to have to be more specific.” Her problems—and the ship’s—were currently still a scattered and poorly documented mess. Just getting them all into an action list would be an improvement.
Again, she had to listen through extensive quackity-chirping prior to hearing his words in English. “I was prepared to scan our prisoners so we could prove that they were in proper health when we transferred them.”
“Oh shit. Don’t tell me there was a fight.”
More in-tik noises followed, and even Jessie could sense the agitation behind them. “No. The prisoners were all gone. The door to one cell has been removed. The other… The whole wall Drascz made has been… I don’t know how to describe it… spooled up?”
Jessie’s blood ran cold.
That wizard.
She was faking it this whole time.
“Get out of there, get to Med Bay. Stay put.”
“Aye-aye, Captain.”
A quick and frantic search found the haathee equivalent of a general quarters alarm. Trumpeting blasts hurt her ears, but there was no missing the urgency. She opened a shipwide comm. “Intruder alert! All hands prepare for shipboard combat. The pirates are all loose. Consider them armed and dangerous. Non-combatants seek shelter. Everyone else, arm yourselves!”
Fuck. FUCK!
Where would they go? Only two options made sense.
The bridge to take over, or the hangar to escape. Jessie locked out the bridge commands under a password, drew her sidearm, and headed for the lifts.
Eric clasped his hands at his back. He counted to five with each breath.
The tooting of an urgent haathee battle alarm raised his blood pressure but didn’t chase him from his spot in the hangar, lingering where the Or Not to Be had recently departed. High above, lights flickered back on in a sporadic pattern.
“So… we’re just… going to stand here?” Charlotte asked.
Eric shrugged. “Jessie’s no fool. She’ll figure it out. Unless we plan on taking one of the other ships, we’re going to have to face her eventually.”
“I’ve been relearning tech, but that doesn’t mean I’m remotely qualified to”—she twiddled her fingers at one of the nearby starships the Arete had confiscated—“operate one of these.”
“Aunt Esper and Aunt Tiffany both manage to be wizards and fly, but Uncle Enzio insisted I’d be a better wizard if I didn’t clutter my mind.”
“That’s settled, then. We wait. How long do you think it will take them to get here?”
Eric pointed. “There are usually lights on panels to either side of the lift doors, and a little one above.”
“I don’t see any.”
“And I don’t think we’ll have company until they turn back on. Just theorizing, but Jessie will be madder the longer it takes.”
Charlotte appraised him up and down. “You’re slouching. Stand up tall if you’re going to stand up to Jessie. And before you object, it’s not a metaphor, it’s body language. You’re barely two centimeters taller than her, but if you feel a commanding presence within you, you’ll be taller than Grosstet.”
“That one is a metaphor.”
“Yes.”
Eric stretched his neck and back and wiggled himself up to his full height. He didn’t feel any bigger.
“We really do need to get you properly attired. This is what… refugee chic?”
“Not sure I’d call it chic, but it’s comfy.” He assessed her in return. “Not everyone can look great and be comfortable at the same time.”
“There’s an art to it,” she assured him. “Once circumstances permit, we’ll find you a mixture of personal expression and pleasure to wear.”
The indicators around the lift doors blinked back on. “Ah. There we go. Any time now.”
Charlotte snuck in a quick hug before straightening Eric’s clothes and giving him a little nudge to fix his posture again.
Then, the doors slid open.
Jessie marched out, blaster drawn. She had Grosstet, Trebla, and Mindy with her, all armed. “Step away from him,” she ordered.
Hands up, Charlotte took a step to her right to separate herself from Eric.
Scowling, Eric took two steps to the right and put himself in the line of fire. “What the heck are you doing?”
“She’s faking!” Jessie snapped. “She can still use magic.”
“No, I really can’t,” Charlotte said, with that adorable accent that made it sound like the word had an “O” in it.
“I did it,” Eric assured Jessie. “Go ahead, be mad at me.”
All the while, Jessie and her posse closed in. “Not buying it. It might have been your magic that pretzeled the brig—”
“Really more of a cinnamon pinwheel…”
“But she was the one pulling your strings. Where is the Or Not to Be?” Jessie angled her blaster to train it on Charlotte, but Eric kept moving to block her.
“Put that thing down before someone gets hurt!” Eric ordered.
Jessie backed up a step and lowered the barrel of her blaster. “Listen! You don’t even sound like yourself.”
Charlotte spoke up from behind the cover of Eric’s body. “Have you considered, even for a moment, that your brother’s been a nervous wreck since you met up with him on Mars?”
The blaster barrel twitched. Eric moved yet again. If Jessie was shooting anyone, it would be him.
“You’re manipulating him.”
“You’re ignoring him.”
Jessie shook her head. “Eric’s always been quiet.”
“He’s always been quiet around you.”
“Eric, where is the pirate ship?” Unable to win this argument, Eric noted that she’d reverted to her earlier line in inquiry.
“I couldn’t let you kill them.”
Jessie seethed out a breath. “I made a decision. We couldn’t afford to go all the way to Phabian just for a laxer set of criminal penalties for piracy.”
“Pull a trigger. Someone dies. Murder? Yes. Push someone off a building. Someone dies. Murder? Still yes. Send someone to a planet where someone else will… will…”
Charlotte helpfully intervened. “Strap them into a chair and irradiate their brains to mush.”
“Murder!” Eric declared. “And I couldn’t just let it happen.”
“She’s in league with them,” Jessie insisted, gesturing with the blaster, but not in the way that she aimed it to shoot at people, which Eric tallied as an improvement.
Charlotte pushed up her sleeves. “Do you know what these are?”
“You explained.” Jessie didn’t sound convinced or swayed.
“I was their slave. I was to be brought back, brought to heel, and trained to use the magic they allowed, the way they allowed, when and only when they allowed. Oh-ho-ho, I’d have been pampered and praised and fed like a queen, so long as I behaved myself. A gilded cage awaited me. Those men and women—well, six of the nine, at any rate—were tasked with returning me to that life against my wishes.
“And I still chose to help Eric set them free rather than let you condemn them to death.”
“That wasn’t your call. Either of you.”
Eric felt a tiny candle of anger warming him from within. “Like hell it wasn’t.”
Jessie blinked. “Excuse me? I’m captain.”
Eric marched up to his sister until the barrel of the blaster was against his chest. Abashed, she lowered the weapon. “You’re captain because I got us off Mars. You’re captain because I got you off Echo Niner. You’re captain because I helped Grosstet get his ship away from Phabian.” Eric caught himself in a rant and lost momentum. “Well, you’re also captain because I whooshed us five years into the future, turning us into renegades and ruining your navy career. So… sorry. But that still doesn’t give you the right to go around vacuuming up pirates from the Black Ocean just to murder them.”
