Mage-Provocateur (Starship's Mage: Red Falcon Book 2)

by Glynn Stewart

  David sighed. He was authorized to brief local authorities on Red Falcon’s true nature, but it had been made clear that everyone preferred he didn’t.

  “Our status is classified,” he said bluntly. “But yes, you can presume that at least one of the people in the room works for MISS.”

  Al-Mufti chuckled.

  “I wouldn’t expect more, Captain,” she admitted. “As I imagine you noticed the lack of response, I guess it’s not a surprise that two months ago, an office in El Dorado was destroyed by a planted explosive.

  “We didn’t realize it was the MISS base office until we dug into why someone would have blown it up with everyone inside.”

  David winced.

  “We have no ability to access MISS communications,” Al-Mufti continued, “but we were at least able to recognize that someone was trying to communicate and locate them. I have been praying that someone would make contact.”

  “Ma’am…if you have a problem, why aren’t you reaching out to the Navy?” David asked. “From what I can tell, you’ve vastly expanded your system military in the last year. Surely, any external threat would be better dealt with by the Navy.”

  “We did,” she told him. “Two years ago. A Navy destroyer squadron sat in orbit of Tepoztopilli for nine months. Nothing happened for those nine months. The ships left, quite reasonably in my opinion, for other duties.

  “Inside seventy-two hours, we had a bombing, a planetary minister kidnapped and assassinated, and a civilian jump-ship hijacked,” she said. “The Navy has been running random patrols through the system as best they can, but whoever is fucking with us seems to know when they’re coming as soon as we do.

  “I’m forced to conclude that either our military or our government has been penetrated by whatever organization is trying to destroy our economy and bring down the government,” she finished.

  “You don’t even know who’s doing this?” Soprano asked.

  “Not a clue. Anonymous demands, occasionally. Some threats, similarly anonymous. Four jump-ships hijacked or destroyed. Sixteen in-system ships hijacked or destroyed. Nine government officials murdered. Four kidnapped and successfully ransomed.”

  Al-Mufti shook her head as she reeled off the list. “That’s the last fourteen months,” she conceded. “We shot down one ship a month ago that tried to jump a starship. That was after we got the missile suites online…but I can’t help but fear that our shadowy enemy is already plotting to undermine that capability.”

  “You want our help,” David said grimly.

  “I want MISS’s help,” she agreed. “I need someone with the skills and the knowledge to find these people and protect my world. A system military doesn’t produce a great many spies and counterespionage agents, Captain.”

  “That’s not really our expertise, either,” he admitted. “We can reach out to MISS, pass on a report. We’ll need an excuse to head to Sandoval once we’ve off-loaded, but I can report in and make sure you get help.”

  “That’s as much as I could safely hope for,” Al-Mufti replied. “I’ll reach out through some of my personal contacts, see if I can arrange a cargo heading to Sandoval for you.

  “I don’t want to use public resources,” she admitted. “I’m not sure I can trust my own people, let alone my government.”

  “I sympathize,” David told her, remembering his own problems with spies aboard Red Falcon. “We’ll see what we can do, Commodore.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” she said quietly.

  25

  Each of Atlatl’s new orbital cutters took up an entire standard cargo container, despite only being half the mass of the normal cargo. The new squadrons of the fleet little ships that Atlatl had ordered were the first things off-loaded, several of the containers barely making it to Nahuatl Orbital before crews swarmed over them to get them into space.

  The cutters weren’t heavily armed by starship standards, but their short-ranged missiles were more than powerful enough to take down just about any civilian starship in a few seconds. They also had the engine power to act as tugs if needed and the excess life support to act as rescue ships.

  Most systems didn’t go in for quite so many of them as Atlatl had ordered, but any system government worth their salt usually had at least a dozen or so. They were useful little ships, and David didn’t feel at all bad about delivering them.

  He was a bit twitchier over the containers containing multiple divisions’ worth of tanks that were being carried to the surface of the moon below him via heavy-lift shuttle. He could understand why the Atlatl System’s government wanted to upgrade their spaceborne forces, given the threat pattern he could see in the data they’d given him.

  The massive upgrade to their ground forces seemed to be, basically, because they could sell a legislature panicked by terrorist attacks and hijackings on it.

  Looking through their data, he suspected that the people of Atlatl were overestimating the scale of the threat. The sheer number of attacks was terrifying, yes, but they all occurred some time apart.

  He figured the people screwing with Atlatl had maybe three ground-strike teams and, with one ship lost, maybe two starships left. Light ships, too, from the scan data they had. The usual kind of refitted jump-yachts used by pirates and bounty hunters.

  Demonstrably capable of taking down Atlatl’s obsolete corvettes, but no match for their home-built orbital missile network, let alone the destroyers building in low Teotihuacan orbit.

  The Captain shook his head as his wrist-comp pinged an incoming call. He didn’t recognize the ID, but…well, he was cargo-hunting right now.

  He flipped it to his wall…and then was forced to swallow down nausea at the scene that appeared.

  “Oh shit, sorry,” Blade said immediately, using the cloth in his hand to clean the blood splatter off the camera. “Wasn’t sure where our Legacy friends had put the camera.”

  Once the camera was clear, the Augment went back to cleaning the forty-centimeter-long blade protruding from his other hand. The reason he was cleaning the weapon was clearly visible behind him in the scattered wreckage of what had been at least half a dozen human beings.

  “I wanted to let you know my mission here is complete,” the Legatan continued, “and I wondered if I could ask a favor?”

  “I’m…not headed back to UnArcana space,” David said faintly, focusing on the cyborg’s face and trying to ignore the gory mess behind him. Several other Augments were moving through the chaos, checking over bodies.

  “I don’t need a ride,” Blade told him. “I had one lined up, but since I found out where Legacy buried their escape ship, I don’t even need that. We’re good all the way home.

  “This place, however, is at least theoretically an import/export office, the kind of place that might be trying to hire you. I need you to swing by, like this call was for an appointment, and then call the cops.”

  David swallowed. His own conversations with Commodore Al-Mufti meant he’d probably have to tell her where the Legacy base was. Doing it as a favor to the Legatans was, he supposed, a bonus.

  “I…I can do that,” he agreed slowly, still trying not to look at either the slaughtered people behind Blade or the implant weapon he was cleaning.

  “Good. Give us about an hour to get out of here, then swing by and call the locals,” Blade told him. “Hopefully, they’re smart enough to look at the databases quickly. From what they told me before they stopped twitching, they’ve got at least two more hack-job pirate ships floating around, and while I can’t do anything about them, I’m pleased as punch to let the locals finish wrecking their shit for me.”

  The cyborg grinned.

  “Thanks, Captain Rice. You’ve been very helpful.”

  The channel cut, and David sighed.

  He was starting to hate his new job.

  It didn’t look any more pleasant in person. David rolled his wheelchair into the ruined office, accompanied by Skavar and several of Red Falcon’s Security troops. Most of the
people hadn’t died cleanly or quickly—he wasn’t sure if the Legatans hadn’t been able to get guns down there for some reason or had simply chosen not to use them.

  The Augment’s built-in blades had been more than enough. There were enough guns scattered around to show that the Legacy’s people had been hardly defenseless, but they hadn’t been equipped to stop a kill-team of cyborgs.

  Few people were.

  He tapped his wrist-comp.

  “Nahuatl Orbital Emergency Central, what is your emergency?” a voice said swiftly.

  “I was supposed to be meeting someone for an appointment, but their office looks like a massacre,” he told the woman. “Someone killed everyone.”

  He knew he sounded more tired than upset. He doubted it sounded remotely right to the woman on the other end of the call, but it was all he could muster at the moment.

  “What’s your location?” she demanded after a second. “Is there any sign of an active attacker?”

  David reeled off the location of the office.

  “No attacker that I can see,” he told her. “Just…bodies.”

  “We have a team in the area,” she replied. “Please remain in position until they arrive.”

  “Of course.”

  The channel cut, and he shook his head. He’d given Al-Mufti the heads-up, so there should be a proper forensic team with computer specialists only a few minutes away. He’d needed to come in and make the call directly, just in case the Legatans were watching, but he was willing to abuse his other hat to get people in play faster.

  He wasn’t expecting Al-Mufti herself to show up, the Commodore entering the office at a carefully slow pace in the trail of her people.

  They might not have been briefed in full, but the team knew what the priority was—and it wasn’t the tired middle-aged man in the wheelchair.

  The Commodore gestured for him to join her in the corridor, where any bugs the Legatans had set up to watch what happened next couldn’t trace.

  “We’ve killed any bugs and we’ll have the computers open in a few minutes,” Al-Mufti said quietly as he wheeled up to join her. “That’ll tell us a lot—and if there’s more ships, we’ll find them. And deal with them.”

  “This is a damned mess,” David told her.

  “It could be worse,” she replied philosophically. “From the firepower scattered around this room alone, I think we may be suddenly short a local problem.”

  He nodded.

  “We’re still heading to Sandoval,” he said. “Mars needs to know what’s going on. They’ll probably send help.”

  “We can hope,” she agreed. “I’m not going to trust the kind of psychopath who did that”—she gestured at the office behind David—“to have given me all the information.”

  Al-Mufti shook her head.

  “I can see how they did it with a handful of agents and three ships,” she admitted, “though damn, does that make us all look like incompetents. Officially, all I know is we have a bloody massacre in a shipping office that we’re going to eventually connect back to our pirate problem.

  “Even unofficially, it’s not like I’m sending LMID a thank-you card,” she finished drily.

  “You shared an enemy, Commodore. Nothing more.”

  “I know. And I’d frankly rather they’d just told us where the bastards were. Arrests sit better with me than this mess,” she told him.

  “From what I was told, the reason they wiped this particular cell of Legacy out was that they had data on LMID’s operations in Protectorate space,” David pointed out. “They didn’t want us to interrogate these people.

  “They just wanted them dead.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve arranged that cargo to Sandoval for you,” she told him. “If I were you, I’d take something of a roundabout route. If these guys hate you as much as it sounds like…”

  “They can try anything they like,” David replied. “If all they’ve got is a pair of hack-job jump corvettes? They won’t even scratch my paint.”

  Al-Mufti chuckled.

  “I envy you that,” she told him. “I don’t suppose I can interest you in mercenary work once we’ve located them?”

  “I prefer to have fewer witnesses when I fight pirates,” David told her. “Red Falcon’s full armament is still something of a mystery to many of my enemies. I’d like to keep it that way.”

  26

  “We’re loading what?”

  Jeeves’s voice was flat and surprised as Kelly laughed at him.

  “Dirt,” she repeated. “Fourteen point six million metric tons of prime-grade farm dirt, sterilized of Nahuatl microorganisms and reseeded with a Terran microbiome.

  “Key ingredient in localized terraforming projects. Sandoval Prime has a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, but the local plant and animal life are inedible to humans. Farming projects require the replacement of the local ecosystem down to a microbiological level, hence…”

  “Dirt,” the gunnery officer said, looking at the flow of hundreds of containers drifting through space toward Red Falcon. “And we’re being paid for this?”

  “Standard carriage rates,” Kelly agreed. “We’re not getting extra to haul dirt, but we’ll have it to Sandoval faster than anyone else would. So, we can pick up another cargo and move on from there.”

  “I understand the logistics of a fast freighter,” Jeeves said drily. “Just the economics of shipping dirt between planets hurts my head.”

  “Only makes sense when the planet that’s getting it can’t grow food in the native soil,” she confirmed. “But since Sandoval Prime can’t, here we are.”

  “Twelve more hours to load our dirt,” Jeeves pointed out. “And then what?”

  “We head straight out, according to the Captain,” she told him. “Sandoval has an RTA and we need to touch base with MISS on Mars.”

  “Yeah, ’cause the fact that I took a job on a covert ops ship is making me feel so much better,” he replied.

  “Did you prefer jail?” Kelly asked. She was actually curious. “This isn’t exactly a harsh prison, as I understand.”

  “Ehhh. Medium-security facilities aren’t too bad,” Jeeves said. “I’ll take Falcon over it except when we’re being shot at, but still… might take it over the Navy. The Navy was fine, but I wouldn’t put the uniform back on.”

  He sighed.

  “Of course, they wouldn’t take me either. Criminal convictions do that.”

  “What did they catch you for?”

  “Arms smuggling.” Jeeves shrugged. “Made what looked like a good deal with one of the Blue Star leftover groups. Seemed like a great way to turn my seed cash into a bigger investment, but there was a reason it was such a good deal.

  “The syndicate got their guns and I got left holding the bag when the police arrived,” he concluded. “I should have known better, but I wanted to be independent.”

  “And now you’re with us.”

  “And Captain Rice is technically my jailer,” Jeeves agreed with a shrug. “I owe him from way back, but this job isn’t a favor to him. It’s a favor to me. Learn from my lessons, XO. Don’t deal in guns and don’t work with crime syndicates.”

  She coughed.

  “We just delivered eighteen million tons of weapons to Atlatl,” Kelly pointed out. “Don’t deal in guns, huh?”

  Jeeves chuckled.

  “I said you should learn from my lessons, Second Officer LaMonte,” he replied. “The Captain has learned his own lessons. I can’t speak for him.”

  Teotihuacan Security was on the move at the same time as Red Falcon was. As Kelly maneuvered the big freighter, now loaded with a stupendous quantity of high-quality soil, away from Nahuatl Orbital, the six corvettes were moving as well.

  “I hope that the Legacy ships are even more crap than they are,” she said aloud, watching their icons. “I wouldn’t want anyone I liked aboard those ships.”

  “I would say that the locals agree with you,” Jeeves told her, tapping a command
to mirror his focus to the command chair. “Take a look.”

  One of the larger icons marking the Tau Ceti-built destroyers was moving. Kelly focused on it, running through its data and shaking her head.

  “I’m a damned engineer,” she said softly. “That ship is barely combat-capable, if she is at all. She’s leaking atmo. Probably closer to finishing her fit-out than the other one, but that means her crew has barely touched her systems.”

  “She’s still a destroyer, XO,” Jeeves replied. “She out-masses all six of those corvettes combined and is about fifty years more modern.

  “I see everything you do…and I’d still rather ride that destroyer than one of those corvettes.”

  She sighed and nodded.

  “Not our call, if not necessarily not our problem,” she concluded. Red Falcon shifted under her hands as she aligned the big ship. She checked a screen and nodded.

  “We’re clear for full engines. Bringing us to ten gravities.”

  The freighter vibrated under her and her navigation display updated.

  Eleven hours to jump. Then they would be safe. For now, at least.

  They were still three hours away from jump when the first explosion lit up Falcon’s scanners. It was rapidly followed by dozens more as the Teotihuacan Security flotilla’s missile salvo struck home.

  Even from almost two light-minutes away, their scanners were good enough to show Kelly at least some detail on the battle that was going on. Like most gas giants, Teotihuacan had a set of trailing trojan asteroids that followed along in its orbital wake.

  Unlike many gas giants, it was close enough to its star that the trailing trojans were relatively close to Teotihuacan. They’d been close enough that the pirates had apparently been using them as a base, using their knowledge of the Atlatl System’s defenders’ systems to stay hidden.

  The Legacy pirates had seen the flotilla coming in time to try and run—but Al-Mufti had expected that and brought her seven ships in on a vector where the Legacy couldn’t reach space they could jump from in time.