by Terry Mixon
Fuck.
“They haven’t, so far as a crap-ton of the money I made for this Everdark-cursed gig can tell, actually seized anyone’s families yet, but they know where they are. Thanks to said crap-ton of money, I also know where the families of every member of Longbow’s crew are.”
Michaels smiled thinly.
“So, this is my real price, Agent Falcon: your Agency saves my family and makes at least a real damn effort to save the families of the rest of our crew.
“Meet my demands, and this ship is yours, and I’ll tell you everything I know.”
Brad shared a glance with Falcone, then sighed as a thought struck him.
“That’s between Agent Falcon and her boss,” he said. “But I do have one question for you: do you know if that poison tooth has a remote control?”
The Cadre man’s smile thinned to white.
“Oh, it almost certainly does,” he told them. “Every officer and noncom you’ve captured will have one. That’s why I’m pretty sure none of the hardcore cases are still alive—but you may want to get some pliers in here if you want to get those answers from me.”
Falcone looked furious as she stalked out onto the bridge. Her entire body language changed as the door closed and she shook her head.
“Who the fuck does that pirate think he is?” she demanded aloud.
Brad sighed.
“Unless I missed the pieces he gave us, he is an ex-Fleet officer who bought a line of bullshit when he should have known better, and then got trapped with his family’s lives on the line,” he told her. “He’s Cadre, he’s a pirate, he’s even—at least at some point—a Dark-cursed volunteer…but he wants out.”
“The only way out of the Cadre is in a fucking body bag,” Falcone snapped.
“That’s what the Phoenix wants,” Brad said quietly. “Kate, if they have capital ships—drone carriers, another cruiser, heavy destroyers… a lot of their crew have to be like Michaels. Blackmailed or with hostages. They have to know we’ll cover for them if they turn.
“Plus, he’s right on the time limit—and regardless of what Connor Michaels has done, his family doesn’t deserve to meet a Cadre assassin.”
“It’s not your damn call, Commodore Madrid,” the spy snarled.
“It’s yours. And we need his data. So, make the call,” Brad told her calmly. “Think with your head and not your hate.”
He held her gaze for several long seconds, and she made a shaky, chopping nod.
“I seem to recall saying something similar to you once,” she noted. “And…you’re right. I’ll ping Mars. We’ll probably need a recording from his family before he’ll talk.”
“Likely,” Brad agreed, and stepped over to look at the builder’s plate that told him the ship was utterly impossible. “And I think we need him to talk.
“Saburo.” He gestured the Colonel over to him. “Let’s get medics to check over the prisoners—I don’t want anyone who doesn’t want to be questioned biting on a tooth, and I really don’t want anyone who wants to talk be killed by a damn remote control.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
With orbits the way they currently lined up, the round-trip time for a radio message to Mars was almost an hour. The Commonwealth Investigative Agency’s people were good, but they couldn’t move out and take a list of just under a hundred names into protective custody, potentially while under fire, and get back to Brad immediately.
The Vikings took the time to move their four ships in and around Longbow and make sure their own communications were tight. Brad’s little fleet had taken more of a pounding than he’d hoped, but most of it was thankfully superficial.
All of his ships could fight. Heart of Vengeance was short a lot of her reactive armor, but her systems were intact.
The only casualties had been in the boarding op, bodies that were slowly transported back to Oath of Vengeance while Brad paced the deck of the captured carrier.
“I don’t suppose Fleet will let us keep her?” Michelle asked over the radio. “Just think what we could jack our rates to if we were the only mercenary company in the system with a carrier.”
“Given that Fleet doesn’t even like to admit they have carriers?” Brad replied. “I’ll be happy if they buy her off us and don’t just confiscate her.”
“I can probably guarantee that,” Falcone told him as the Agent appeared, leaning against the command chair Brad had co-opted. “There’s no way I can get them to let you keep her, sorry. Not with those semi-sentient killing machines downstairs.”
Brad had carefully chosen not to go inspect the returned Javelin drones. Falcone had taken a closer look.
She hadn’t come away looking overly happy with their existence.
“And that’s before I mention that Saburo’s Geiger counters tell me there’s nukes in the torpedo magazines?” Brad said sweetly.
“Nobody wants you anywhere near nuclear weapons again, Brad,” Michelle told him from Oath’s bridge. “Not Fleet—and definitely not the Cadre!”
Falcone checked something as her wrist-comp beeped, and lost some of the color on her face.
“Well,” she said, then swallowed hard. “We know that the Cadre now knows the convoy went dark. I doubt they know if anyone survived, but every tooth implant your medics removed just went off as one.
“And we didn’t even pick up the signal.”
“That’s…not good,” Brad noted.
“Low frequency, multi-emitter,” Reece guessed, the tech currently half-buried inside the communication control consoles. “Probably bounced it from four or five sources timed to hit here at the same time. Interference would make identifying a source impossible, and the low energy would make it hard to detect at all.”
The Vikings’ commanding officer looked at the image of his wife and the Commonwealth Agent standing next to him. “Did that make sense to you?” he asked. “Because it almost made sense to me.”
And if any of the three women listening to him believed that, well, they wouldn’t be working for him.
“There we go,” Reece announced. “Someone who put this together was a paranoid bastard.”
Michaels had given them codes he insisted should activate the carrier’s communications suite. They’d very clearly worked…and the console had shut itself down moments later.
“We guessed that,” Brad told her. “What did you find?”
She held up a plain black box the length of her hand.
“Dead man’s switch. The moment the captain died, the communications system sent an alert pulse and shut down. We’ll want to check the other systems, too. We need Michaels’s codes, but if they dead-man-switched key systems in case of a mutiny…”
“Paranoid bastards,” Brad agreed. “Who was the captain?”
“The skinny fucker Michaels shot,” Falcone told him. “I’m hoping for an ID back from the Agency, but I’m guessing he’s ex-Fleet like his third officer.”
The communications system came back online as she spoke.
“Any old messages in the buffer?” the Agent asked hopefully.
“Switch wiped the local memory when the captain died, sorry,” Reece replied. “Physically burnt out the boards. There’ll be backups in the main core, but…who knows what code ran when that switch got yanked.”
“So, we may have a lobotomized ship?” Brad asked. “Even if Michaels gives us his codes?”
“Unlikely,” Falcone said. “They wouldn’t want the ship to be completely useless if something happened to the captain. The Cadre wouldn’t accept a single point of failure. I’m guessing we just weren’t supposed to be able to communicate until a Cadre pickup force arrived, but we’d still be able to complete whatever mission they were on.”
“If there’s any more traps aboard this ship, find them,” Brad ordered. He wasn’t planning on keeping the ship, but having a Cadre capital ship had all sorts of possibilities buzzing around his brain.
“We’ll have her clean by tomorrow,” Reece promised.
“Now I know what to look for, I can check over systems pretty quickly.” She shook her head.
“If we don’t get an officer’s codes to get into the systems, though, it’ll be weeks before we can take control of her.”
“Let’s hope your friends on Mars did their jobs,” Brad said to Falcone. “Still waiting on that update?”
“I have faith,” she told him. “They’ll get it done.”
It was another hour before the message from the Agency finally arrived. The man in the video was noticeably older than when Brad had last met him barely eighteen months before. Randy Cartwright had had faintly reddish hair and freckles when the Agent had helped Brad infiltrate a Martian suburb to chase the Cadre.
The freckles remained, but the hair had gone white and there were new stress lines around his eyes. Cartwright hadn’t had a good year.
“Madrid was always a good source for a headache, wasn’t he, Kate?” he asked quietly. “We went for the names on the list. We’ve successfully extracted sixty-three of them. The rest?”
He shook his head.
“They’re gone, Kate. Some of them have been gone for days, others for weeks…months. I don’t know if they’re alive or dead, but from the context you sent me the damn list in, I’m guessing alive. In a fucking Cadre box somewhere.”
Brad inhaled sharply. That would be his own personal worst nightmare, one that had come very close to true when the Terror had used Michelle as bait to lure him in. That hadn’t ended well for the Terror, but it seemed the Phoenix didn’t fall far from the tree.
“We got Michaels’s family,” the Martian continued. “Half a step ahead of a squad of Cadre commandos—aiming for live extraction, I think. And I mean the hard-asses, too. We dropped our Marine overhead on the bastards. No prisoners, and they got at least half of their team out.
“I hope these people are worth it, Kate. I’ve got five of mine and six of Admiral Weber’s in hospital—and three Marines in body bags.”
“Fuck,” Falcone murmured. “They really went after those families hard.”
“I checked a bunch of your other data. Some of it officially, some of it not. Bailey says she never said a damned word about any carriers, but so long as that’s clear, she knows where all eight are and validated their locations as of twenty-four hours ago.
“Fleet isn’t missing a carrier. There was a prototype that she is over ninety percent sure was melted down—and the only reason she isn’t a hundred percent sure is that she trusts Madrid.”
Commodore Bailey, CO of the battleship Eternal, was the senior starship commander of the Martian Squadron. She and Brad went back a while with an acrimonious relationship that had included everything from threats and cursing to Bailey almost having to execute him for illegal use of nukes.
“Oh, and Bailey most definitely did not provide a database of all Fleet personnel who retired, were made redundant, or officially died in the last four years. And it’s definitely not attached to this message.”
Cartwright sighed.
“There’s also a message to Michaels from his wife and kids. Hope it helps. I have found entirely new reasons to hate the Cadre today.”
The message ended and Brad looked over at Falcone. “The attachments?”
“The thoroughly illegal database we definitely don’t have and a video for Michaels. Which do you want to tackle first?” she asked.
“ID the captain, then we’ll talk to Michaels,” Brad decided. He wasn’t sure they needed that ammunition, but it could come in handy.
Falcone was already setting to work and inhaled sharply as she got a result almost instantly.
“Lieutenant Arthur Vong, how far off the beaten track you fell,” she said softly. “Right on the edge of Bailey’s search parameter. He was cashiered for selling drugs aboard Freedom four years ago.”
She snorted. “Michaels outranked him in Fleet grade and time, but he’d been with Cadre longer. They clearly trusted him, a lot given the damn dead man’s switches.”
“Michaels is in there too?” Brad asked.
“Yep. Last Fleet role was as CAG for Spearthrower, but he took a voluntary early retirement package that was being offered as part of the first round of cuts. He’s right. We worked together at Venus, about three years back.”
“And folks got sent to the Mercury mines?” the Vikings leader asked.
Falcone winced.
“They were luring high-altitude craft in the Venus atmosphere too low, hacking their systems so they ended up in pressure zones they couldn’t handle—and then grabbing the wreckage in ships designed for the Venusian surface,” she noted. “At least two hundred dead we knew about, and we needed to find their base—but every one of them was a sick bastard who’d earned a bullet.”
“I wasn’t arguing,” Brad told her. “I just want to know how deep a hole you dug with this guy.”
“That depends on whether he still thinks he’s an officer…or if he realizes he’s fallen into the category as those wreckers.”
The video from Michaels’s wife was about what you’d expect. This is today’s date. We’re alive and fine. Why in Everdark are Marines kicking down my door and asking me to record this video?
It was enough. More than enough, as the Cadre officer literally had his head in his hands after the first few seconds. Brad carefully did not notice the tears streaking his face when he looked back up at them.
“Thank you,” he said quietly. “And the rest?”
“I am prepared to consider a guarantee of life in a medium-security prison for yourself and your people,” Falcone said stonily. “I cannot—I will not—promise full amnesty for pirates and criminals.”
Michaels sighed.
“Do you really think the electronics technician running machine shop three on this ship can be considered directly involved?” he asked. “Yes, there are people aboard this ship guilty of real and serious crimes, but a lot of the crew are accessories at most. The Independence Militia ships don’t carry boarding troops. We don’t see the aftermath.
“They have true Cadre ships accompanying us for that, and Cadre commandos,” Michaels noted. “They use us for fire support, and there’s a psychological element to it, too.”
He sighed. “They know damned well that we can lie to ourselves so long as we don’t actually participate in the thefts and massacres, hide behind the rags of our honor and our duty to protect our families.”
“This ship alone is responsible for at least half a dozen raids I know of,” Falcone told him. “Enough of that blood is on your people’s hands that I won’t offer more. Your family is safe. Most of your crew’s families are safe, and the Agency is looking for the rest.
“You’ll go to a medium-security facility on Deimos, one the Agency has thoroughly vetted the staff of. You’ll serve time for your crimes, all of you, but you will live.”
It was harsher than Brad might have offered, given what they now knew about the crew of Longbow…but it was more merciful than he’d give most Cadre, too.
Michaels considered for a long time, then nodded.
“All right. Do you want me to talk or unlock the ship first?”
“Talk,” Falcone ordered. “I’ll have questions, but let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”
He exhaled, putting his hands on the desk. He studied them for a long moment, then pulled a bottle of whisky out of the desk and poured a generous dollop into his coffee.
“The beginning, huh?” Michaels said softly. “There’s a lot of beginnings, and most won’t make sense to anyone who isn’t a Fleet officer.” He gestured to Brad. “Madrid will get some of it, but we all know his reserve commission is a fig leaf.
“But…there’s a lot that goes on in the Outer System that Fleet knows about but can’t deal with. We say we don’t have the hulls, we say we don’t have the hands…but truthfully, what we lack is the will. The Commonwealth has the industrial capacity to mass-produce corvettes, at the very least. The Fleet, before the cuts, was two hundred a
nd forty-three ships strong.
“One set of estimates I was privy to said that with a less than one percent increase in the overall Commonwealth budget, they could build, crew, and arm a hundred corvettes and twenty destroyers in two years. A fifty percent increase in the numbers, if not the tonnage, of the Fleet, enough to secure the Outer System and actually provide order across Sol.
“Of course, part of the reason we don’t do it is that the Outer System would fight us,” Michaels admitted. “So would the Jovians, if we handled it badly. It wouldn’t be a police campaign. It would be a fucking war.”
That…understated things, Brad suspected. If it was done carefully, with appropriate respect for local authorities like the First Oberon Council of Speakers, it could easily birth a new golden age for humanity.
Even he didn’t think the Commonwealth could do it that way. It would be war. The Mercenary Guild would split down the middle, with half of the companies taking contracts from whatever entity organized the rebellion and half fighting for the Commonwealth.
It was a nightmare scenario.
“That’s…why there’s no will,” Michaels noted. “I understand that now. I didn’t two years ago. I was Martian-born, Martian-bred. My Fleet service had been almost entirely inside Mars’s orbit; all I saw was the news.
“And then the cuts came, and the offer of voluntary retirement with partial pension.” He shrugged. “There were a lot of recruiters around at the time. The Mercenary Guild and the Jovian governors understood the assets available…and what they were losing in the strength of the Fleet.
“I don’t think anyone would have flagged the Independence Militia recruiters as anything different, but it was all cloak-and-dagger even then,” Michaels admitted. “It was supposed to be a privately funded counter-piracy force in the Outer System, but the recruiters hinted at a different purpose. If you pushed hard enough—I didn’t, but others did—it was strongly implied they were building a revolutionary fleet to declare independence from the Commonwealth.”