“Something’s got to be making them nervous,” David murmured to his gunnery officer. “If they just bought a destroyer, though… Bets my ADC fees are going up?”
“No bet,” Jeeves replied. “The Amber Cooperative fees only go in one direction, boss.”
David chuckled and fired off a message to Heinlein Station, the main orbital platform, identifying his ship and his Cooperative membership statuses.
“That’s fair enough,” he agreed. “In this case, though, some of those fees are coming back to me to pay for this trip. Can’t complain too loudly.”
“I never do, boss,” the other man replied. “Keep your eyes open, though,” he continued. “Looks like they’ve increased the orbit patrol.”
David looked at what Jeeves was indicating and nodded slowly. Red Falcon had much better passive sensors than most civilian ships, which meant she could pick out the boxy corvettes making their ballistic orbits around the star.
Normally, the ships were positioned so at least one would orbit past anyone flying in from outside the belt, but today…there were at least twice as many ships as usual, with a cluster of a dozen ships orbiting just outside Amber’s own orbit.
Anyone who focused on the destroyers was going to get a nasty surprise when those ships, each packing a laser equivalent to Falcon’s own five-gigawatt beams, brought up their drives at the closest approach on their unpowered orbits.
The ADC was feeling twitchy. Those deployments cost money, and if there was one thing David had learned about Amber’s Prime Cooperatives, it was that they did not spend money they didn’t think they needed to.
Citizenship and being a recurring visitor made the docking and accounting process smoother than it had any right to be. It was still an expensive endeavor—things that were considered “public service” and performed by government employees elsewhere were fee-operated enterprises here—but David had all of the accounts set up and knew what he was going to be paying.
His first visit there had been a confusing mess, but that had been years before. He knew the drill. His Citizenship allowed for his crew to get visitor passes with ease, and it wasn’t like Heinlein Station was dangerous.
It was safe in different ways and for different reasons than most places, but it wasn’t dangerous. It was just an unusual experience for anyone used to the regular Protectorate setup.
For one thing, even aboard the space station, everyone was armed. David had visited frontier worlds with actively dangerous wildlife where a smaller portion of the population went armed than Amber. Culture shock was inevitable.
Now, of course, he and his people simply strapped on their guns and set about their business. He, LaMonte and Soprano converged in his briefing room after they docked, all three of them wearing obvious holsters—a contrast to their normal concealed armament.
“Kelly, I need you to deal with the cargo,” he told his XO. “Most of this is for the ADC, but we’re carrying something like fifty secondary cargos. Handle them.”
She had admin staff for that as well, and he trusted her skills.
“Can do. If they decide they need to talk to a Citizen for any of this, will you be available?” she asked.
That wasn’t unheard-of, though it usually meant someone was intentionally being a prick.
“I can’t say for sure,” he admitted. “However this conversation with Keiko goes, I doubt it will be over quickly.”
Or at least, if it was over quickly, he was going to be in both professional and personal trouble.
“Right. I’ll ping Kellers, make sure he’s available then,” LaMonte told him. The chief engineer kept up his memberships to avoid problems when he came home.
“I’ll coordinate with Leonhart,” Soprano promised. “We’ll make sure the locks are guarded and we’ve got at least one Mage on the security detail at all times.”
“We shouldn’t need that here,” David replied.
“Something has the Defense Coop spooked,” she pointed out. “And while I trust Keiko, I don’t trust her countrymen. You’ve been shot here before, after all.”
“That was when Azure had a bounty on us,” he protested. “With both the Blue Star and the Legacy gone, no one has any prices on our head that I know of.”
LaMonte snorted.
“Well, wandering around Heinlein Station incautiously is a good way to find out if there are any,” his XO told him. “Let’s keep an eye on the ship, boss. If nothing else, I don’t want any inquisitive locals poking around and realizing how well armed we are.”
A lot of people had probably figured that out by now, but it was still mostly a secret. David hoped.
“You’re not wrong,” he conceded. “I’m going to see Keiko alone, though. No escort for that.”
“And if someone does jump you?” Soprano asked sweetly.
“Have you met the Amazon brigade that runs this ship for me?” David asked. “I’ll just surrender and leave it to you lot to rescue me!”
“Again,” LaMonte noted with a sigh. “When did our Captain become a professional damsel in distress?”
Heinlein Station’s Quadrant Gamma had a large gallery at its core, a multistory open space with balconies ringing it filled with offices and market stalls. It was one of the largest shopping spaces on the ring station and had the crowds to prove it.
The ubiquity of firearms still disconcerted David, even with his experience with the system’s culture. It threw his finely tuned professional paranoia completely off, but thankfully he made it to the discreet office door on the “bottom” floor of the gallery without interruption.
Inside the discreet door was a quiet reception area lined with plants. A small number of comfortable-looking chairs were tucked in one corner for people waiting, and a petite, dark-skinned young woman with short-cropped hair sat behind a desk.
She looked up at his arrival and gave him a brilliant smile.
“Captain Rice! We didn’t know you were in-system,” she told him.
“I’m sure Keiko does, Leanna,” he pointed out with a chuckle. “We just docked with a cargo for the ADC. I need to talk to your boss.”
“Of course you do,” Leanna agreed with a chuckle of her own. Leanna Alabaster was Keiko’s niece—and also the niece of David’s chief engineer. “I don’t think she’s on-station at the moment, but I can check.”
“I’d appreciate that,” David said. “It’s more urgent than I’d like, too, so…”
Leanna nodded and was already tapping away at a concealed console in the desk with one hand while she gestured him airily to the chairs with the other. She might look like a receptionist still, but David knew that the young woman now ran most of Keiko’s Heinlein Station operations—and her brother was now the second engineer on one of the ships their aunt owned.
She continued typing for at least a minute, then produced a headset.
“Yes,” she said into it immediately. “I can keep him here or get Falcon’s dock number. Which do you—” She paused, waiting for a moment. “He said it was urgent.”
Leanna shifted the headset on her ears and looked at David thoughtfully.
“Yeah,” she finally agreed, and gestured him over. She took the headset off and passed it to him.
“Hello, lover,” Keiko’s warm voice echoed in his ear. “What’s going on?”
“It’s complicated,” he told her. “I’d rather discuss it in person, for more reasons than one, but it’s urgent.”
She sighed.
“I am all but literally tied up in a major Prime Cooperatives convention,” she told him grimly. Unless David missed his bet, that was the next best thing to a meeting of Parliament for Amber. “Leanna flashed me a priority signal to get me out of a meeting, but if I don’t get back in there, these idiots either aren’t going to buy a cruiser or are going to spend way too much on it.”
A cruiser?
“I would hate to impose,” he demurred, “but…”
“You don’t use the word urgent lightly, David,�
� she finished for him. “Tell Leanna to give you the hotel. She’s not supposed to know where the convention is, but if she doesn’t, she isn’t doing her job.
“Can you get to the surface by, say, twenty hundred OMT?”
He checked the time. That gave him six hours to either find a shuttle or get clearance for one of Kelzin’s. Plenty of time.
“I can manage that,” he promised.
“Then meet me at the hotel,” she told him. “That’s as fast as I can manage an in-person meeting; sorry.”
“It’s as fast as I could hope,” he replied. “See you then.”
The channel went silent and he passed the headset back to Leanna.
“She says you’re not supposed to know where she is,” David told the office manager. “But that you do and can tell me what hotel to meet her at.”
Leanna chuckled.
“Yeah, the Prime Coop meetings are pretty locked down,” she confirmed. “Officially, if you aren’t in the top five hundred unit-holders of one of them, you aren’t cleared to know where they’re meeting.”
That meant, given the overlap between the major unit-holders, that there were probably less than a thousand people on the planet who were supposed to know where the convention was. That said…
“And?” he asked.
“Nine Seasons Hotel, downtown Garnet,” Leanna confirmed instantly. “Keiko is in room 55–260. If you let me know your course, I’ll have one of our people meet you with the papers you’ll need to enter the hotel right now.”
12
Riding an auto-taxi in Amber’s capital city was both similar to and quite different from riding one in any other city in the Protectorate. Every city would have the “tolls” section of the fee, much like the cab carrying David through Garnet.
In Garnet, however, that section was ticking up even faster than the regular fare. Streets had been built by private interests, and a complex system of RFID tags and area coding in vehicle computers made sure those private interests were compensated for their construction and continued maintenance.
No single toll was particularly significant, but it added up to slightly more than the cost of the cab ride itself by the time he reached the Nine Seasons Hotel and authorized the machine to debit his account.
Whether, over the course of a year, the tolls would add up to less than the portion of taxes another world would have assigned to building those streets was for others to work out. David just paid whatever he was asked to pay wherever he was.
That was always the lot of those who traveled. They didn’t get much say in what went on in the places they traveled between.
The Nine Seasons Hotel, at least, didn’t look any different from its counterparts on other worlds. A massive edifice of artificial granite and tempered glass, the luxury hotel occupied an entire city block in Garnet’s downtown core, towering a hundred stories into the air and shadowing the streets around it.
There was no sign outside the hotel that anything unusual was going on inside, but as soon as he stepped in it began to be obvious. There were none of the crowds of people checking in and out that you would normally see at a hotel of this size. The Nine Seasons had over twenty thousand rooms and suites. Even with automated systems handling ninety-nine percent of the process, there were enough people with problems requiring a human touch that the lobbies would normally be full.
Today, they were empty. Discreet signs announced that the restaurants were closed, and the uniformed hotel staff hovering attentively around the main floor were being attentive for different reasons from usual.
“Excuse me, sir,” one of them said, descending on him with near-instant teleportation. “The hotel is being rented for a private event. We are full.”
“I have an access pass,” he told the woman, tapping a command on his wrist-comp to bring up the document.
A wave of her PC over his transferred the file, and she examined it meticulously.
“I see, Captain Rice,” she allowed, waving at someone.
The slightly older man who arrived at her gesture was wearing a hotel uniform…but it clearly wasn’t his usual uniform. His black hair was cropped close enough to his skull that it was hard to see where his similarly shaded skin ended and the stubble began, and he moved with the athletic purpose of a lifelong soldier.
“Mr. Mbeki here will take you up to the fifty-fifth floor,” the staffer told David. “The Nine Seasons Hotel appreciates your respect for our guests’ confidentiality, of course.”
His pass had come along with a seven-page nondisclosure agreement. So far as he could tell, he couldn’t even admit to having seen anything here to himself, let alone to his crew.
The soldier gestured for David to follow, and he fell in obediently. As they passed through the lobby, it rapidly become clear to the merchant captain that at least half of the “hotel” staff were either ADC troops or private security.
Some of them were probably hired by the hotel, but the type of people who became top-five-hundred unit-holders in the Prime Cooperatives had their own security. It might be a “mere” hotel, but the Nine Seasons was probably currently the most defended location on the planet.
To no one’s surprise, David was sure, Keiko Alabaster’s “room” was an extensive suite done in tasteful dark granite and blue fabric. Despite his being exactly on time, the suite was empty.
That, too, wasn’t really a surprise. His understanding was that the kind of convention he was crashing only happened twice a year or so and was where a lot of what would be the “business of government” on other worlds was decided.
The suite had a kitchenette with a full complimentary bar so he busied himself making two of Keiko’s favorite cocktails with the plan of waiting for her.
He’d barely finished mixing the drinks before the tall redheaded woman swept into the hotel suite with a final “pull together a briefing and send it to my PC” instruction out the door to whatever staff she was leaving behind.
With a smile, David offered the cocktail across the bar, and Keiko laughed.
“All right, Captain, that buys you a few minutes of my time,” she told him as she took the drink. “It’s been a hell of a few days.”
“Everyone is busy sorting out how to keep a planet with no government running for six months until the next time you all meet?” he inquired.
She snorted.
“That part is normal. ADC’s new wish list, though…that caused a meltdown on the part of some of our unit-holders.”
“A cruiser?” he echoed her earlier comment.
She shook her head.
“You’re flying around in one of the most over-gunned excuses for a jump freighter in the galaxy,” she pointed out. “How many times have you been attacked by pirates in the last year?”
David paused thoughtfully.
“We do deal in high-value cargos,” he said slowly. “But…four? Maybe five?”
“And you have the guns and the speed to make going for your cargo a bad idea,” Keiko said. “Piracy rates are up across the board. Ships are getting lost, people are dying…the Navy is moving heaven and earth to do their job, but it seems like every bug they squash, three more crawl out of the woodwork.”
He winced. That was worse than he’d thought—but Keiko would know.
Of course, the usual source for those pirate ships was right there.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she confirmed. “It’s bad enough that the Judicial Coop just asked for—and got—authorization to start inspecting shipyards and enforcing a restriction list on the sales of armed warships.”
David blinked. That was counter to everything Amber tried to stand for. They must be worried.
“So, new jump-ships?” he asked.
“The only real argument is whether we buy Tau Ceti’s or build our own,” she told him. “Hence potentially paying way too damn much for the one cruiser the DC wants. There’s no point in us building the infrastructure for manufacturing large-scale warships, plus…”
“None of that was what you wanted to talk to me about, though,” she realized. “Sorry, I think I just vented three days’ worth of frustration and a pile of classified information on your head.” She finished the cocktail.
“I know I can trust your discretion. Can you make me another one of these as well?”
He laughed and pulled out the booze.
“What did you need to talk to me about?” she asked.
“Trouble,” he admitted as he considered how to phrase it. “I need to find Nathan Seule, Keiko.”
She was silent as she took the drink, considering her answer.
“That’s not what I expected,” she admitted. “Neither of you subcontracts shipping, and if you wanted to get involved in my gunrunning, you already would be. What’s going on, David?”
He stared at his own drink for several seconds, then downed it in one gulp and looked Keiko Alabaster directly in the eyes.
“You know damn well Stealey recruited me for Martian security,” he said quietly. “Well, now she’s dead and we’re staring a potential interstellar civil war in the face. Nathan Seule ran guns into Ardennes, guns we’re pretty sure Legatus paid for and supplied.
“We need to know where they came from.”
“‘We,’” she echoed. “MISS, I presume?”
“You don’t presume; you know,” David objected. “We’ve never talked about it, because this isn’t part of my life I wanted to involve you in, but I know what your intelligence network is like.”
“My intelligence network, to be honest, thinks you got tied up in a one-man war against the Legacy and grabbed whatever allies you could,” she pointed out. “None of them thought you’d actually been recruited.” Keiko sighed. “I knew better, but I didn’t expect you to try and use me as a source.”
Her tone left no question of her opinion of this.
“That was never my intention,” he told her. “We both have parts of our lives that don’t enter the room when the other is there. We always have. Unless one of us decides to completely change their life, we always will. I’m not going to move to Amber and become a kept man, and you sure as hell aren’t going to move aboard Falcon.”
Agents of Mars (Starship's Mage: Red Falcon Book 3) Page 7