#cybermage

Doubtful, now that I knew what was really going on here. Whatever she thought she was trying to do (I tried to get a closer look at the datapad without her realizing I was doing it), it didn’t look like the planetary revitalization work that she had spoken of before. There were elements of that, maybe, but there was something weird about it

I increased my useless struggle against the cables again as she looked up at me.

I had a single card of my own to play, and I was going to have to play it carefully if I wasn’t going to become this woman’s next victim.

“This was definitely not what I had in mind,” I responded, not finding it too hard to sound panicked. It was tempting to point out that unwillingly given blood was not an efficient way to power just about anything, but that would have told her too much.

And these types never seemed to believe it anyway, no matter that it had been proven conclusively. They always thought that if you just had enough of it, it would be more powerful than any other energy sources.

It did explain why so many people had gone missing in this sector lately…and suggested that our estimates were probably low.

“Whatever you had in mind, I promise that your sacrifice will not be in vain,” she assured me.

“I bet you tell that to all the cargo haulers,” I muttered, still struggling against the metal that no physical strength on my part could possibly escape.

She laughed, a low, melodic sound, and did not deny it. “It has been true every time.”

That was definitely a lie, even if she didn’t know (or didn’t want to know) it.

“Lay still,” she advised, eyes glinting as she set her datapad aside and turned to her instruments.

If she was about to start cutting into me, then I was nearly out of time.

Taking a chance, I twisted the hand on the side facing away from her so that my pinky could just brush the cable strapped around my wrist where it looped underneath the table, and sent a very carefully controlled spark of power down and through the table and into some of the electric cables connecting it to the generator.

It was a struggle to keep control of that spark, keeping it quiescent and traveling smoothly along until it reached a piece of equipment on the far side of the room…one of the few that didn’t look as if it were in the best of repair. Then, I let go of my control.

The machine began to beep unpleasantly at the sudden, if small, surge of not-quite-electrical power in its inner workings.

Frowning, she turned to stare at it, and then scowled.

“Just a moment, my helper,” she told me, and turned away to see to the malfunctioning machine.

Metal cabling of the kind I was strapped to the table with was the best possible choice to hold any random spacer you were trying to keep still while you drained their blood. There was only one time when it would be a mistake to use it, and she would have assumed from the ship I arrived in that it was not a mistake in my case.

As soon as her back was turned, I let my inner barrier fall and the magic surged out of me, down through the cabling and the table and the power cords and out to every piece of immediately connected equipment in the room. The cables loosened, and I was off the table before she had a chance to turn, horror and rage twisting her lovely features.

I had definitely made several mistakes on this mission, but fortunately, I had only needed her to make one.

Arrogantly, naïvely, stupidly, or maybe all of those things, she had assumed that no technomage would arrive on an unintegrated ship.

The shockwaves passed, and though it didn’t look quite as square as it had when I had first come through earlier, the corridor was intact. Since I was already interfaced, I powered up one of the built-in diagnostic arrays, my magic racing out along the pre-set channels, confirming that the structure was still sound.

Faintly, I could sense the whine and pulse of the laser canon as Vivi continued to ward off whatever lingering threat remained outside. I was pretty sure that the crashed ship was the one that had been shooting the ship-killers at the planet surface, which some of the other ships obviously hadn’t liked.

Vivi must not have liked the look of the rest of them either, though, if she was still warding them off.

Shutting down the diagnostic array and pulling my power back, I picked up my discarded glove and took off my helmet before making my way down the corridor and deeper into the station again.

Although she was still seated at the weapons console in the main control room, Vivi wasn’t firing any longer, her eyes tracking the scanner that showed three ships disappearing rapidly back into local space. When they had finally disappeared and she had activated some kind of perimeter alert spell that also seemed like it was already part of the system, she turned away to look at me.

“That could have gone better,” I sighed, coming the rest of the way into room, dropping into a nearby chair without taking off the rest of my suit.

“Not actually the worst first surface-walk I’ve seen,” Vivi said thoughtfully.

I eyed her sidelong. “Do I want to know?”

“No,” was her immediate answer.

Nodded, I managed a huffed laugh and let my head drop back, eyes closing.

“Anything unusual?” she asked after giving me a few minutes to rest. A creak and the faint metal thunk of her boots told me she was shifting back to the main control console on my other side.

“Not that I could really see before someone started shooting ship-killers at me,” I admitted. “I assume there aren’t any survivors from that one?”

“Definitely not,” she confirmed.

That might have been just as well. We weren’t equipped to deal with that kind of thing, with only the two of us here in a facility that was still largely unfamiliar. We both had decent medical training, of course, and could do basic regenerative spells if we didn’t have access to good health equipment, but we were still just investigators.

But I could hear the slight frown in her voice, and opened my eyes. She didn’t look happy, and I couldn’t blame her. We hadn’t shot the ship down, of course, but enough people had already died on this particular hunk of rock. We had not been intending to add to that number, however tangentially.

“I don’t understand what was going on,” Vivi said, and I nodded when she looked over at me. “I mean, obviously the rest of them didn’t like that the one ship was trying to…what? Blow up this facility? Damage the surface? I know that one missile came down too close here, but they certainly didn’t concentrate their fire in this area.”

“Was it more than just the few I saw?”

“Yeah,” she replied, pulling up a visual that showed where the missiles had struck. They covered a wide chunk of the planet, as if the ship had been trying to carpet as much of the surface as possible. “Maybe they just didn’t know where the station was?”

“A little more scouting or scanning would have told them that,” I pointed out, frowning at the pattern. “I see what you mean though – it is almost like they were looking for something, or testing for weaknesses.”

“In the crust of a planet?” Vivi was skeptical. “With ship-killers? I grant that they make a dent, but on an uninhabitable like this one, that’s about it.”

It didn’t make much sense, but I didn’t have a better explanation right now. “What about the other ships?”

“They seemed like they were thinking about landing, so I warned them off,” Vivi said. “Didn’t get good scans on any of them, but they seemed like pirates of some kind. Scavengers wouldn’t have engaged the other ship, I don’t think. They weren’t willing to put up a fight about it, anyway.”

“That’s kind of weird too, though,” I mused, “I mean, maybe they know there something to be had from this facility, but it’s honestly not that big. What would have been worth fighting over it?”

Vivi shook her head. The planet itself had some mineral resources, we thought, including high amounts of lead, but there was a lot of low-level, strangely regular seismic activity that we hadn’t been able to explain yet, and some other things that indicated something odd was going on here.

These attacks had done nothing to decrease my sense of urgency to figure out what the oddness was. This, our first attempted trip out onto the surface, had been to examine some of the monitoring spells more closely in the hopes of understanding what the purpose of the vast (and still ongoing) data collection was.

I was too tired to go out again today, though, even if it might be safe now.

“Try again tomorrow?” Vivi suggested, in sync with me as always. I nodded gratefully and she grinned. “I’ll cook.”

“Must you?” I groaned. Our tastes in regard to spiciness were…not the same.

“I’ll go easy on you,” she promised, and left the room. I sat a moment longer, glad of the quiet, my ears still ringing a little after the earlier blasts.

One of the periodic seismic rumbles, this one a little bigger than usual, reverberated through the metal below my feet.

Shuddering, I got to my feet and followed after Vivi. Being alone anywhere in this place suddenly didn’t appeal.

“Planetary rehabilitation, or terraforming, or something like that,” I told her. “Is the surface as uninhabitable as I think it is?”

“Certainly looked that way to me.”

“That’s what I saw on the way down, but then I wasn’t sure if I could trust it. All the instrumentation here indicated the same thing, but I’m still not quite sure what parts of this system I can trust either.”

“We’ll sort it out,” Vivi promised. It was such a relief to have her here. “Where should I get started?”

“See if you can get any of the other interfaces in this room working again? The magical signatures indicate that they didn’t all do the same thing, and I’d like to see if this data makes more sense once I can look at more parts of the system.”

“Sure,” she agreed. “Any urgent life-support things?”

“Fortunately, that equipment was all in another room.”

“Cool. I’ll go grab my tools and be right back.”

I nodded, distracted by the data scrolling by on the screen. All technical, no spells or hints of magic, not at this console. Just a constant stream of geological, climatological and seismic data from what seemed to be all over the planet. The problem was that there was no way Lin (I’d have to use the false name until I could dig up her real one) had enough technical equipment in enough places to be generating this much data. So either it was all false (or at least heavily extrapolated from a smaller number of locations)…or it was being sourced through spells that I couldn’t detect.

Even if it was spell-sourced, it was still an incredible amount of data.

I was no closer to an answer by the time Vivi came back, so I turned that data stream off and went back to digging through the few technical specs for this facility that I could find through this console.

Something weird was going on here, weirder even than a rogue technomage kidnapping random spacers for blood sacrifices. Somehow, I had to figure out what it was.