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

by Glynn Stewart

  “Assuming, yeah,” Jeeves told him, then sighed. “That was it, boss. We’re out of Phoenixes. Fifteen minutes before we’re in range for the Rapiers.”

  “Well, let’s see what the good Admiral does.”

  Red Falcon’s missiles closed on their targets at almost twenty percent of lightspeed, having crossed the intervening millions of kilometers in just under seven minutes. Ten missiles weren’t a lot, not against four ships that had been based on the design of Martian Navy destroyers.

  Against a flotilla of RMN destroyers, David probably wouldn’t even have launched the missiles. On the other hand, against a Navy flotilla, he’d have already surrendered if he couldn’t run. Red Falcon’s armament was designed around different parameters than a destroyer but was roughly comparable.

  Four of them could eat his ship for breakfast. Their only hope today was that the Golden Bears’ monitors were enough inferior to a Navy destroyer to make up the difference.

  “First salvo neutralized,” Jeeves reported. “We’ve got some ugly radiation hash, though.” He shook his head. “I can’t assist the further salvos at all now. It’s up to the computers.”

  “Fortunately, we’re not running the default code for Phoenix Sevens,” LaMonte replied. “Kellers and I added some tricks while we were laid up in Tau Ceti. They’re scarier independent than I bet these guys are counting on.”

  “I’ll let you know in about, oh, twelve seconds,” Jeeves told her dryly.

  “Focus, LaMonte,” David told his XO. “Our incoming?”

  “Crossing the range of the RFLAMs now,” she said. “Electronic warfare…let it run, let it run.”

  David swallowed as Falcon’s lasers remained silent.

  “Kelly, there are thirty-two one-gigaton warheads heading for this ship,” he pointed out.

  She held up a finger.

  “Trust me.” She watched, typed in several more commands, watched again…and then hit an initiation key.

  Ten seconds later, Red Falcon’s skies were clear. The radiation hash inevitable to taking out antimatter weapons was still over three light-seconds away from them.

  David checked his systems. The turrets had fired three times, a total of seventy-five laser pulses, to wipe out thirty-two missiles.

  “Okay, that wasn’t bad,” he admitted. “What now?”

  “We got one!” Jeeves snapped. “One hit…no, two! Monitor Charlie just ceased fire and is spinning out of control.

  “She’ll probably live, but she’s mission-killed,” the gunnery officer announced. “She isn’t accelerating and is falling behind fast.”

  “Can we retarget the remaining salvos?” David asked.

  “Already on it. They should do so independently, but I’m making sure,” Jeeves promised.

  “Second incoming salvo neutralized,” LaMonte told them. “Rad hash at nine hundred and forty thousand klicks.”

  And there was the problem of even successfully stopping antimatter salvos. Each time LaMonte wiped out a group of missiles, the chaos created by dozens of antimatter warheads detonating created a zone where Falcon couldn’t target the missiles.

  And with each salvo, that zone crept closer.

  “Nailing down their defenses,” Jeeves reported as their third salvo died ineffectually short of the Golden Bears. “Looks like fifteen half-gigawatt RFLAMs apiece, same turrets we’re carrying.”

  David nodded. That meant Red Falcon had better missile defenses than any individual ship she was facing, but the combination of the three remaining ships had enough to deal with Falcon’s anemic salvos.

  LaMonte’s modifications to their missiles were helping—Monitor Charlie had managed to get part of her engines back online but was now actively withdrawing from the battlespace, for example—but they were simply outclassed by the flotilla they were facing.

  What had to be driving Aristos crazy, though, was that LaMonte was consistently shooting down every missile he threw at them. It wasn’t going to matter if the Bears had three times as many launchers as Red Falcon and twice the missile defenses if he couldn’t land a single hit.

  “Ten minutes to Rapier range,” Jeeves announced. “About another eight after that for laser range.”

  “At this point, he’s got to be planning to finish us there,” David said. The Bears had finally run out of antimatter missiles, it seemed, but having fired fifteen salvos of thirty-odd missiles each, they’d spent a lot of resources trying to get at him.

  “Do we think he’s done with missiles?” LaMonte asked. “I’ve got one more trick in my quiver, but it’s easily disabled if they have hard access to the birds.”

  “He’s probably got fusion missiles, same as us,” David told her. His Rapier IVs were one of thirteen different brand names, all with several tiers of roughly comparable weapon systems. He’d be shocked if the Bears weren’t carrying something functionally identical to the Rapier IV, with its four thousand gravities of acceleration and seven minutes of flight time.

  It was the most expensive tier of “civilian” available weapon out there, but he doubted Aristos had made it to the top of his field without being prepared to buy the best.

  “But no more Phoenixes,” his XO concluded. “Okay. Um. Boss…how all-out are we planning on going?”

  “Kelly, he’s going to vaporize us if we don’t stop him, so I’m not too concerned about showing our cards. Why?”

  “Included in my files on the Phoenix VI is a command override code,” she told him. “Won’t work if he’s running the Navy security encryptions or if he’s disabled the receivers, but if he’s running them in the standard mode for militia use…”

  “They put an override code in the missiles they sold the militias?” David asked. “Damn.”

  “I suspect every militia in the Protectorate knows about it and knows how to disable it if, for some reason, they thought they were going up against the RMN,” LaMonte pointed out. “But even if Aristos knows about it, he definitely doesn’t have the security encryptions to block it, and disabling the receivers reduces their effectiveness.”

  “Do it,” David ordered.

  His XO grinned at him again, the same brightly happy, terrifyingly wicked grin she’d shown when she’d realized the mercenaries were using the standard software suite on their missiles.

  She pushed a button on her console.

  “Done.”

  “So…what does that mean?” Jeeves asked.

  “We’re no longer a valid target in the missiles’ systems,” LaMonte explained. “Basically, I just overrode their identify-friend-or-foe sequences and set them to fully autonomous mode.

  “The only thing they’ll identify as friendly is us…and they’re going to go after the closest ships they identify as hostile.”

  David swallowed, his gaze turning to the tactical plot as his XO’s transmission swept out. The nearest missiles didn’t have enough fuel to turn around and go after their motherships. Their suicidal little brains ran the calculation, assessed that they were a greater risk to friendlies than the enemy…and self-destructed.

  The lightspeed lag meant he could watch their transmission spread in almost real time. Salvo after salvo self-destructed…until the signal reached missiles whose computers judged that they could reach the Golden Bears.

  Those missiles flipped in space. Suddenly, instead of accelerating toward Red Falcon at ten thousand gravities, they were charging toward the Golden Bears at the same acceleration.

  “Bring us up and over the radiation hash,” David ordered. “Stand by the battle lasers and Rapiers; take us right at them and see how badly they panic.”

  Whatever the Golden Bears had been expecting from this battle, it hadn’t been for their missiles to turn on them. Red Falcon picked up the fringes of increasingly complex and desperate attempts to re-override the missiles controls or even just self-destruct them.

  None of them worked, and the Bears’ missile defenses now came to life against their own missiles. The salvos came in far slower th
an the ones Falcon had launched, but they were also larger and unexpected.

  Between the co-opted missiles and Red Falcon’s salvos, over three hundred missiles hammered in on Aristos’s fleet. Space around them lit up with radiation and explosions, making it almost impossible for David and his people to track what was going on.

  When the chaos finally ended, the space between Falcon and her enemies was clear…and two of the Bears’ monitors were just…gone.

  The last ship was now accelerating away from them, trying to rejoin the ship damaged earlier.

  “From her acceleration, Monitor Alpha is still basically intact,” Jeeves warned. “Even with Charlie’s damage, I suspect they both have their lasers online… Chasing them would be a bad idea, boss.”

  David nodded silently, studying the icons. A single hit from one of the ten-gigawatt lasers the monitors carried would wreck his ship, but he had a decent chance of taking out both monitors before they could hit him.

  Of course, since both of them had fusion-drive missiles, they had a not-insignificant chance of taking Falcon out, too. LaMonte’s trick had evened the odds nicely, but even odds weren’t what you want when you needed to get a cargo home.

  “They now know exactly how much firepower Falcon has,” he pointed out. “And from Kelly’s trick, they can probably guess just what our affiliations actually are.

  “That’ll be a headache. A big one.”

  “Skipper…there are at least two hundred people on each of those ships,” LaMonte reminded him. “Are we really willing to kill another five hundred people just to keep a secret, not to protect ourselves?”

  In a moment of somewhat painful self-reflection, David realized that he was. Not so much to keep the secret, but to protect his people. He’d kill every last one of the Golden Bears to keep LaMonte and Jeeves and Soprano and everyone else aboard Red Falcon safe.

  But…he couldn’t quite bring himself to order LaMonte and Jeeves to take that blood on their own hands.

  He sighed.

  “Let’s see if they’re willing to talk,” he said finally. “How far out of Rapier range are we?”

  “About three minutes. Time for at least two exchanges, maybe three, depending on how fast you guys talk,” Jeeves told him.

  David took a deep breath, then exhaled in a fresh sigh as he came to a decision. They’d demonstrated that Red Falcon had one hell of a stick. Now it was time to see how Jason Aristos felt about carrots.

  “All right, Aristos,” David said into the camera. “We’ve flexed our muscles, flung missiles at each other and you’ve managed to get several hundred people killed so far.

  “By now, you realize you can’t destroy Red Falcon. We can evade you now—and by now, you can guess that we have enough friends in high places to destroy you. As things stand right now, the Golden Bears’ mercenary license won’t last ten seconds after we make it to Sandoval Prime’s RTA.

  “But you, Admiral, are not my enemy.”

  David leaned back in his chair, steepling his hands as he looked evenly at the camera.

  “My enemy is Azure Legacy. They contracted you. Pointed you at me. And you came after me with everything you had.

  “You have failed them. They don’t accept failure lightly. They’re going to want their money back, Admiral Aristos, and they may well take it in flesh and blood.

  “I have an…alternative to us killing each other,” David told Aristos. “I will refrain from exposing your extracurricular activities to the Protectorate and pay you one hundred million Martian dollars—not, perhaps, enough to replace your losses, but enough for repairs for your damaged ships.

  “In exchange, you will tell me where to find Azure Legacy’s leadership.” David smiled. “It’s a win-lose situation for you, Admiral. Refuse my offer, and either I kill you or the Protectorate destroys your little empire.

  “Accept it, and you get to continue operating and I destroy your former clients before they can come after you.

  “The decision is yours.”

  He hit transmit and shook his head.

  “Think he’ll buy it?” LaMonte asked.

  “I don’t know,” David admitted. “Hold the pursuit course after them regardless. Jeeves?”

  “Sir?”

  “Get the Rapiers prepped. If Aristos doesn’t want to play, I want him hammered to pieces.”

  Jeeves swallowed. He didn’t look as assured about Red Falcon’s chances in a straight-up fight as David did, but he nodded his agreement and turned back to his console.

  Radio waves traveled at the speed of light, crossing the void between the starships at what felt like a crawl sometimes. David couldn’t help counting the seconds until the earliest moment he could receive Aristos’s response.

  Silence. They crept toward missile and laser range. There was no way to avoid weapons range at this point, even if they both vectored away. They would either come to an agreement or they would kill each other.

  “Incoming transmission.” LaMonte studied it for a moment. “From Monitor Charlie.”

  Aristos’s image appeared on the main screen. The bridge around him looked the worse for wear, showing the signs of the antimatter missiles that had knocked Charlie out of formation early on in the fight.

  The Admiral Commanding didn’t look much better. He’d clearly been hit by a piece of debris at some point and made only the minimum effort to stop the bleeding. A bandage was wrapped around his head, but half-dried blood marked the entire side of his face and neck.

  “You’re a bastard, Rice,” he said bluntly. “If I sell out my clients, I’m done. But if I let you tell the Protectorate what we’ve done, I’m done too. You call it win-lose? I call it lose-lose.”

  The dried blood cracked as he grinned, the expression truly horrifying on the mercenary’s wounded face.

  “So, the best choice I see is to sell out my clients and hope you finish them off before anyone knows what I’ve done,” he concluded brightly. Hundreds of dead subordinates didn’t seem to be bothering the Admiral much.

  “I’m standing down my offensive weapons and sensors,” Aristos told them. “I’m still running my antimissile turrets and defensive radar, but I will not engage you. Once you’ve sent the money, I will give you the information you desire. I know who the Legacy truly is, Captain Rice, because I insisted before I took this deal.

  “I considered it an insurance policy. It appears it is time to make a claim.”

  28

  “So, now we know,” David told his senior officers.

  The Golden Bears had limped off with their hundred million dollars and their lives, opening the distance between them and Red Falcon until Soprano’s people were ready to jump them away.

  Now David and his top officers and his security chief sat in his office, considering their next step. Dr. Gupta wasn’t normally part of these meetings, but today he hovered at David’s shoulder, continually consulting his wrist-comp’s reports on the half-dozen sensors the Captain was wearing.

  “We knew all along that the Legacy was mostly being organized by lawyers,” David continued. “Now, we know that, at its core, Azure Legacy is lawyers. Every layer out from there is mercenaries, recruits, and fragments of the Blue Star.

  “The core is the law firm of Armstrong, Lee and Howard in Corinthian,” David told his people. “We have some files from MISS and our previous visit, but ALH doesn’t show up much. They’re a small, high-value firm that works with extremely high-net-worth individuals on interstellar affairs.

  “From what Aristos has told me, they’re actually larger than they like to appear, with a lot of underground resources and links into illegal markets. Their existence, it seems, is why the Blue Star Syndicate was never strong in Corinthian: you don’t piss in the water being used to launder your money.”

  “Corinthian, huh?” LaMonte replied. “Are…you and I even allowed back in Corinthian, boss?”

  The last time David Rice had visited Corinthian, he’d filled an entire precinct office with k
nockout gas to rescue Damien Montgomery. LaMonte, for her part, had shot at least three security officers with SmartDarts over the course of the rescue.

  “All records were expunged and all charges dropped, according to the Hand,” David replied. He’d gone back and checked before the meeting, too. His own memories of Corinthian weren’t exactly pleasant.

  “I can’t imagine we’ll be popular with anyone who remembers our faces,” he continued, “but there are no legal problems waiting for us at the Spindle. That probably won’t last once the Legacy realizes we’re there, but at least we don’t have to worry about the police shooting at us.”

  “If we know who they are and where they are…perhaps we should simply pass that information on?” Soprano suggested. “I won’t pretend I don’t like the thought of extorting some payback for the last few months of insanity, but this seems like a problem now better passed on to Marines and police.”

  “In the long run, yes,” David agreed. “But if they sweep the offices, they’ll have time to bury the records. We need them off-balance, looking in the wrong direction—if possible, to even pull their resources out of place entirely and leave their base nearly defenseless when the Marines sweep in.”

  “You sound like you have a plan,” Skavar said, and David smiled.

  He hadn’t sat down and drawn it up, but he did have a plan.

  “I think I do,” he admitted. “A lot will depend on what the situation is in Corinthian, what assets MISS or others can put at our disposal. First, we need to get to Sandoval and report in. That just became even more important.”

  “And then?” Skavar asked.

  “Then we go play agents-provocateur at the Legacy again,” David told them with a grin. “See if we can poke one of our bears into a final mistake.”

  Kelly was sitting in her quarters, staring at the wall as her mind insisting on replaying the cascade of explosions that had resulted from the press of one button, when the admittance chime buzzed.

  She ignored it at first. She didn’t like to think of herself as a killer, but the count of people her clever ideas had left floating in the void was starting to get high enough to make that classification hard to avoid.