kill his friend.
The exosuited soldier was laying his shotgun against Charpentier’s head, making sure he wouldn’t miss. There was no time. No chance to reflect. Only a moment.
Not to decide.
To act.
Ivan barely knew he’d cast the spell. Three blades of force slashed across the room, separating the shotgun from the gangster’s hand…the gangster’s arm from his shoulder…and the gangster’s head from his torso.
Exosuit armor was far from enough against a fully trained Navy Mage. The woman in charge of the team barely had time to open her mouth before Ivan turned, a blast of superheated plasma erupting from his hand and burning clean through her chest.
Armor clattered to the floor, pieces of humans still inside it, and Ivan froze. He’d never killed anyone in his life, and now two people were dead from his magic—but his friend, the man he’d tried to keep safe, was alive.
There was still a ship attached to Restoya. There were still six boarders on the courier.
Mage-Captain (ret.) Ivan Halloway straightened.
He’d made a deal. If Maestro Aquila had broken that deal, his people were going to learn why everyone feared the Royal Martian Navy.
Ivan went to Engineering first. The boarders had come through the airlock attached to the midship decks around the simulacrum chamber, so the bridge and the Engineering section were equidistant.
He was confident that Charpentier’s security systems would frustrate both sets of boarders for a while, but the team in Engineering would be able to cripple or destroy the ship without access to the computers and controls.
The bridge team would need to get into the computers to cause any harm at all. The engineering team had direct access to the fusion reactor and the fusion rockets. Either of those would suffice to obliterate the entire ship if mishandled—and disabling either would render Restoya almost useless in any case.
Ivan had learned many skills in his years in the Navy, many of which he’d barely used. He was almost as battle trained as a Combat Mage, but this was the first time he’d used those skills in earnest.
He’d never been trained in stealth and so he simply walked into the main engineering deck, looking around for the boarding team. They were clustered around a set of consoles he recognized as the main control center for the drones Restoya currently had in lieu of an engineering crew.
“Wait, you’re not supposed to be here,” one of them snapped on seeing him. “What the hell?”
“He’s supposed to be dead,” another snapped, diving for the weapons the boarders had left lying on top of the consoles.
Ivan almost appreciated the confirmation. Once he’d known Aquila had planned to murder Charpentier, he’d figured his own life was likely forfeit. The whole point of taking Restoya during the race was to create secrecy.
The mob boss was never going to rely on Ivan’s remaining silent. He’d known that all along, really.
For now, though, he let the boarders reach their weapons. He didn’t have it in him to kill unarmed men, even in the weird fugue state he was currently operating in. The moment they raised their weapons toward him, fire flashed from his fingers. Half-meter-long bursts of superheated air hammered into all three men at once, flinging them backward across the consoles.
A gun discharged in the silence, a burst of fléchettes slamming into the ceiling harmlessly.
And then a voice spoke, one from someone who wasn’t in the space.
“What the hell is going on? Bravo team, respond. Alpha, respond.”
Only silence echoed.
“Dawnbreaker, Contingency O, Contingency O!” the voice snapped.
Whatever orders followed from that were lost as the speaker cut to a channel that wasn’t playing live in the engineering spaces. Somehow, though, Ivan suspected he was running out of time. He needed to make sure that the remaining team didn’t escape.
Unfortunately for them, he was a Jump Mage. He wasn’t refreshed enough to jump the entire ship. Teleporting the sixty meters between the engineering spaces and the bridge, though?
That he could do.
He appeared in the door leading from the transit pod to the rest of the ship and found himself facing the three troopers of the boarding team running in his direction. All of them were armed and all of them were looking at him.
It wasn’t enough to save them. Force blades flashed and gunfire blazed in Restoya’s bridge. The boarders went down…but Ivan had chosen his emergence point badly. A spread of shotgun fléchettes hammered into his shoulder, sending him reeling back.
He wasn’t wearing armor. His shipsuit could withstand some impacts—it was designed to act