Agents of Mars (Starship's Mage: Red Falcon Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “I suspect Aristos had given strict orders not to fuck with us unless he has overwhelming firepower,” Rice said grimly. “He’s not going to let what happened go, but he’s also well aware Red Falcon can probably take two of his monitors.”

  The Captain snorted.

  “And they probably have an even worse opinion of the SDC flotilla than we do. Kelly, what do we have from their failure of security?”

  The XO chuckled.

  “Those corvettes playing sheepdog over the orbital platforms?” she said first. “They’re not corvettes. If I’m reading the iconography right, they’re just shuttle tenders pretending to be warships. No launchers, no beams, just docking ports.

  “The rest?” She shrugged. “Hard to say if their readiness states are exaggerated, but the munitions numbers, et cetera, line up with what I’d expect for second-rate two-hundred-k-ton corvettes. None of them are at full readiness, and if they are pumping their numbers to look good to the VP, some of the regular ships could be in real trouble.”

  “What about the heavies?” Maria asked.

  “Their status reports look great, but they’re all the same class and we already met those guys,” LaMonte noted. “Let’s not go poke eight of them in the nose or anything, but they’re not worth their weight.”

  “Well, let’s see what happens,” Rice said calmly. “We’re still on a zero-zero course for the planet. Let’s see how long it takes them to actually do something.”

  The answer turned out to be “about four hours.” That was how long Red Falcon continued to accelerate toward Darius without even responding to the blockading fleet’s hails before they did anything.

  From Charleston’s expression in the second video, someone had finally briefed him on Flotilla Manager Ferro’s fate and Red Falcon’s involvement.

  “Red Falcon, you have a lot of gall,” he said without preamble. “You murder one of my subordinates and then you waltz into this system like the blockade isn’t even here? You will surrender and prepare to face justice for the deaths of Patience Ferro and her crew or I will blow you to hell.

  “Please don’t surrender,” Charleston noted with what he probably intended as a cruel or evil smile. “I’m going to enjoy blasting your ship to tiny pieces.”

  That was the extent of the transmission—but the rest of the Security Vice-President’s message was clear. All eight heavy corvettes were now accelerating out to meet Red Falcon, and ten of the regular corvettes were joining them.

  That left only ten corvettes and five shuttle tenders orbiting Darius itself. The first phase of the plan was going off without a hitch.

  “Time to intercept?” Rice asked.

  “Looks like another six or seven hours,” LaMonte replied. “Missile range well short of that, of course.”

  “Let’s start decelerating, make them think we want to extend our time in missile range,” the Captain ordered, exchanging a glance with Maria. “We need to slow down, after all.”

  “That will push it out to twelve hours, maybe a bit more,” the XO told them. “They’re only pulling three gees each. Probably only have gravity runes in key locations.”

  Maria nodded as she studied the fleet coming out to meet them.

  “I can’t imagine a Legatus-headquartered interstellar has that much luck recruiting Jump Mages,” she pointed out. “That they managed to find thirty-odd for this blockade fleet is impressive. I can’t imagine they have enough on hand to put two or three on every ship.”

  Every ship they were facing had at least one Mage aboard to use their jump matrix, but Maria wouldn’t expect them to have more than one. Mages were expensive to hire, and a Legatan corp would end up paying more as a matter of course.

  “How long till phase two?” Maria asked and Rice checked his wrist-comp.

  “I figured our timeline on that was way too long. Guess I was wrong,” he admitted. “Phase two in five hours.”

  “We’ll be ready,” Maria promised, looking around at her Mages.

  “I know you will,” the Captain confirmed. “So will we.”

  “I don’t think SDC is going to be,” LaMonte noted with a chuckle. “But then, I’m not sure I trust them to know which end of the fusion rocket to stand in front of.”

  The next few hours passed with the usual patient waiting of space combat. It would always take less time to actually fight the battle than it would take to close with the enemy. Few space battles lasted for more than an hour of actual combat, but it would take hours, possibly days, for the ships to close.

  If Maria thought she could have managed it, she’d have sent her subordinates to sleep. As it was, Barrow rejoined them eight hours after they’d arrived in the system, and all four Mages waited, quietly, as Red Falcon decelerated at the steady five gravities she’d maintained the entire time in Darius.

  Her base velocity carried her toward the enemy, but she’d reach roughly zero velocity relative to the planet Darius ten hours after she’d arrived in the system, still a full light-minute from the planet.

  The SDC ships tested the waters with a missile salvo and a fusillade of laser fire three hours after they came out after Red Falcon. The range was still far beyond any effective capability of either weapon. Against some enemies, that might have worked, but Red Falcon’s crew was as well trained as any Navy ship now.

  Jeeves didn’t even bring up the RFLAM turrets. LaMonte maneuvered the ship well out of the way of the SDC salvo, and they continued to drift toward the planet.

  “Phase two in ten minutes,” LaMonte eventually announced. “SDC flotilla is now approximately five hours from Darius. I make it five million kilometers with a velocity of over five hundred KPS.”

  “Getting back to orbit will take them over twelve hours,” Jeeves noted. “I don’t think Mr. Charleston was expecting real trouble.”

  Maria nodded. Charleston was clearly no soldier, despite his current role, and had left half of his lighter corvettes behind out of some concept of redundancy. On the other hand, only one of those corvettes was needed to head off any regular merchant ship.

  “Do we taunt him?” Maria asked.

  “No,” Rice replied with a regretful tone. “No, we want him thinking pretty clearly, all things considered.”

  “Phase two in ninety seconds,” LaMonte reported. “This should be interesting.”

  “More so for some than others,” David agreed. “Keep an eye on everything. I want to know the moment phase two executes, and I want to know how both of their forces react.

  “For that matter, I want to know how the Bears respond.”

  The two Golden Bears monitors were on the opposite side of Darius and calmly decelerating toward jump now. There didn’t seem to be any unusual hurry to their movement…but they also were clearly not sticking around to see what happened next.

  “Charleston probably has the money to get them involved,” Maria warned.

  “He almost certainly does,” the Captain agreed. “And it shouldn’t matter. Not today.”

  “Jump flare!” Jeeves snapped. “Luciole is…about fifteen seconds early. But she is exactly on target.”

  “Not shabby,” Rice said as they all studied the jump flare on the screen. “Perfect location, exactly on course.”

  Luciole had arrived ninety degrees around the ecliptic plane from Red Falcon and from an angle of seventy degrees above the plane. There was no way the formation that had charged after Red Falcon could intercept her.

  And unlike any regular merchant ship, there was no way a single corvette could head off the armed blockade runner.

  “And so phase two begins,” Maria murmured. “Your call on phase three, skipper.”

  “Not yet,” Rice replied. “Let’s see what the SDC does first.”

  22

  There was no better way, in the opinion of the Royal Martian Navy and her officer corps—and hence, of one Maria Soprano—to judge the quality of a military or paramilitary force than by watching their reaction to one of their commanders mak
ing the wrong call.

  The SDC fleet had sent far too much of its available strength after Red Falcon. There were ways to deal with that, and the corvette flotilla left behind was capable of at least standing Luciole off, given that the blockade runner needed to deliver her cargo intact.

  In Charleston’s place, Maria wasn’t entirely sure what she would have done…but ordering the entire mobile fleet still in Darius orbit out after Luciole and splitting his current force wasn’t it.

  “Yup, that’s two of the heavies and six regular corvettes breaking off,” Jeeves confirmed. “They’re…well, they’re out of this fight. And that fight.”

  As thoroughly as if Charleston had shot them in the head himself. Eight ships were now on a vector where they’d engage neither Red Falcon or Luciole.

  “Keep our acceleration constant,” Rice ordered. “If our Stellarite friend wants to keep making mistakes, let him.”

  “We’re in antimatter missile range of the SDC force,” Jeeves noted. “Fusion missile range in an hour. Assuming they’re carrying the same birds as the ambushers, they’ll be in range a few minutes after that.”

  “We’ll hit zero velocity relative to Darius shortly before missile range,” LaMonte reported. “We can kick them in the nuts before we go to phase three.”

  Maria was tempted. The Stellarite paramilitaries were the worst kind of corporate bullies in her experience.

  “No,” Rice said calmly. “No, I want Charleston to have to explain to either his masters or a Hand—or, better yet, both—just what he did here. I don’t want to fight a war here today. We’ll execute phase three on schedule.”

  Luciole was burning hard for Darius, and the ten corvettes were coming out to meet her. If they hadn’t realized the remaining ships were shuttle tenders, they’d have thought Darius still had some defenders.

  Those five ships had clustered together in a polar orbit, leaving the main spaceport uncovered. If a third ship arrived to make the final delivery, that would have ended up being hard for their commanders to explain—and that kind of concentration was exactly what Luciole was designed to take advantage of.

  “Are we going to talk to them at all?” Maria asked.

  “No,” Rice replied. “Let Charleston sweat. He signed on with this kind of bullshit; I have no intention of throwing him even the tiniest rope. Keep your eyes open and stand by for my order. It’s almost time to demonstrate why amateurs shouldn’t play with starships.”

  Ten ships hurtled toward Red Falcon, riding pillars of fusion flame as they charged the massive freighter. Maria wouldn’t have put the odds in the corporate ships’ favor now that they’d sent a third of their number after Luciole, but their mission there wasn’t to break the blockade.

  It was simply to evade it and deliver their cargo. The original plan had been for Luciole to repeatedly run the gauntlet, delivering the cargo in ten loads. The sheer scale of the SDC blockade had ended that plan and left them with the one that relied on Maria and her people.

  The ex-Navy Ship’s Mage kept her hands on the simulacrum, feeling the ship’s velocity relative to the local gravity wells rather than watching the numbers on the screens around her.

  “Missile range estimated in five minutes,” Jeeves reported.

  “It’s your call, Maria,” Captain Rice said calmly. “This isn’t an easy jump, so…jump us when ready, Ship’s Mage.”

  Maria’s subordinates were gathered and she’d have work for them in a moment, but right now was up to her.

  Every SDC ship was now at least an hour’s acceleration away from Darius. They were between the two smuggler ships and the planet, so that wouldn’t have been a problem—except that Maria Soprano had once been a Mage-Commander in the Royal Martian Navy.

  And the Royal Martian Navy trained for in-system jumps.

  She slid the runes on her hands into place on the simulacrum, exhaled a long breath…and jumped.

  It was a shorter jump than she’d made in years, and she was jumping into planetary orbit. With a destroyer’s amplifier, it was doable but difficult. With a regular jump matrix, it was supposed to be possible.

  In theory.

  The ship fought her. The spell fought her, magic backlashing through the runes into her flesh as she struggled, forcing the magic to complete and exert her calculated force. Energy rippled and her skin burned.

  And then the screens around flashed brilliantly and Red Falcon was above Darius.

  Maria inhaled sharply, touching her face as she felt blood begin to drip from her nostrils. She wasn’t tired…not really. This wasn’t the type of spell that drained all of her energy like a usual jump. This one had just hurt.

  “Jump complete,” she reported. “LaMonte, please get us into an orbit before we hit the planet. Somebody get us coms…unless we want to land this behemoth, my people’s job isn’t done yet.”

  “On it,” Rice replied. Maria could feel the engines flare to life even without LaMonte saying anything, the big antimatter rockets thundering as they pushed Red Falcon into a stable orbit above the capital city.

  “Well done, Ship’s Mage,” the Captain continued. “Well done, indeed. Now go sit the fuck down. We’ll take care of this.”

  Maria, of course, did no such thing. She did move back from the simulacrum and let Xi Wu take over, but she cleaned the blood off her face and grabbed one of the secondary consoles as the communications link was established to the surface.

  “This is Governor Jasmina Wasyl Mitchell’s office,” a well-dressed young man greeted them. “How may I assist you?”

  “My name is Captain David Rice,” Rice told the aide. “I am in orbit of Darius with a cargo of ten million tons of equipment and weaponry for your government. We have approximately one hour to deliver that cargo before we will need to leave orbit to evade the SDC blockade ships.

  “So, young man, can you help me, or should I be talking to someone else?”

  The aide grinned shakily but widely. “I’ll make you a deal, Captain Rice. I’m going to put you through to the Governor while I call the spaceport and see if we have a damn clue how to pull that off.”

  “Connect your spaceport to my Ship’s Mages,” Rice ordered. “We have a plan. I’ll talk to the Governor while you get them on the line, though.”

  The youth’s grin was just as wide but calmer now as he nodded. A few moments later, a tall, dark-haired woman appeared on the screen, looking levelly at her camera.

  “Captain Rice, Alexus tells me I need to talk to you,” she said calmly. “I am Jasmina Wasyl Mitchell, the elected Governor of this planet, despite what our friends in orbit might have said. If you’re in orbit, something very strange has happened.”

  “Not strange so much as clever,” Rice replied. “The SDC blockade fleet is currently in disarray across half the star system. They came after me…but are now over a dozen hours away. None of their ships can even threaten me for at least an hour.”

  “You’re the cargo from Amber?” Mitchell asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “We don’t have any intact transshipment capabilities anymore, Captain,” she admitted. “Unless you have enough shuttles to transport that cargo in an hour, we may have a problem.”

  “We don’t have enough shuttles,” he agreed. “We do have a problem…but we also have a solution.”

  A flashing icon on Maria’s screen told her that a direct channel was being opened to her.

  “Ship’s Mage Soprano,” she introduced herself as she opened the channel. “And you are?”

  “I am Soth Jada Weigand,” a heavyset man with skin barely a shade lighter than James Kellers’s near–pitch black told her. “I run logistics and supply for the Darius Spaceport. I just spoke to our Governor’s aide, and he says you have a plan for somehow moving your cargo to us?”

  “You have the handling facilities for our cargo?” she asked.

  “We do,” he confirmed. “This isn’t the first ten-million-ton cargo we’ve had come through, though its been a wh
ile. We have both storage and transport capability if you can get them down to the surface.”

  “My tests suggest we can teleport about a spar’s worth of cargo at a time,” Maria told him. “That’s fifty containers. I think we can get them down to you in a stack of fifty, two rows of two with a fifth on top. But that’s half a kilometer of cargo in one shot, Mr. Weigand. And we need to do it twenty times.”

  He barked a shocked laugh as he considered.

  “So, you’ll need very exacting coordinates for all four corners at the very least,” he agreed. “We have the space for it; I think we’ll worry about breaking it down and moving it once it’s down here.

  “That’s our problem, not yours. I can get you those coordinates in five minutes.”

  “We’ve got an hour, Mr. Weigand. Let’s make it happen!”

  Xi Wu went first, under Maria’s watchful and concerned eye. In pure raw strength, Wu was actually the most powerful Mage aboard Red Falcon by a notable margin. Unlike the other three Mages, the XO’s girlfriend had never been part of the Royal Martian Navy and wasn’t as well trained.

  This wasn’t a trick that sheer power could handle. Teleporting only part of the ship using the matrix was a question of finesse and precision, not pure raw magic.

  The big freighter was in a geostationary orbit above the spaceport, her gunners carefully watching the space around them. The shuttle tenders were honoring the threat, the five remaining ships hiding on the opposite side of the planet from Red Falcon and declining to engage.

  Video feed from the surface showed the spaceport parking lot the Darius government had cleared. Presumably, the spaceport’s current all but abandoned state had made that easier than normal, but the massive open spaces allowed for vehicles and buses and aircraft gave the spaceport dozens of square kilometers of cleared and flat space for this effort.

  Mages couldn’t really sense or feel magic in use. There was a degree of it, a faint buzzing, but the Mages who could detect other Mages working with any reliability were rare. There was some technology that could do so, but even it was unreliable.