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

by Glynn Stewart

  “And if we don’t?” Maria asked softly.

  “Then all we can do is fight them in every shadow we find them in and buy time for those new fleets to be built, for the Protectorate to be ready to defend itself,” the senior spy said grimly. “It’s a shadow war right now, and while we believe we know our enemy, we’re not certain of his targets or his objectives.

  “It falls to you to find proof of what Legatus is up to. Others will seek to learn their objectives. When the dust settles, though, it’s all about buying time. If they’re ready and we’re not…it doesn’t matter if we have proof.”

  26

  The meeting with Kieshi left Maria feeling more than a little overwhelmed. She still managed to take the time to confirm the research she’d done on her way in, so when they returned aboard Red Falcon, she made her way down to Engineering to check in on James Kellers.

  He was exactly where she expected to find him: in his office, working far too late as he put together the plans for how to complete the work his team had started earlier that day.

  “Hey, stranger,” she said cheerfully as she stepped into the room without knocking. “How’s your baby?”

  Kellers snorted and leaned back in his chair to look at her.

  “Despite several people’s best efforts, she’s fine,” he admitted. “A little squeak here, a little rattling there. Nothing a couple of days of going through with wrenches and oil while she isn’t flying won’t fix.”

  “Nobody has shot at us in, what, four whole days?” Maria asked. “Just think of how far out of our way we’re going to keep Falcon safe.”

  He chuckled.

  “Yes, avoiding people who want to shoot us does seem to be a strain on this ship’s command cadre,” he agreed, but he was smiling as he said it. “I’m sure you’re not overly interested in the minutiae of which sections of the ship I’m sending people at with said wrenches and lubricating oil. What’s up?”

  “Probably more interested in that than you’d think,” Maria told him. “This ship is my home, James. If I can help keep her flying, that’s in my interests too.”

  “This is preventative maintenance,” he admitted. “We could do a lot of it while in motion and survive without the rest for a long while, but I’d rather take the opportunity whenever we’re in a safe port to make sure it happens.”

  Maria grinned wickedly at him.

  “Careful, Chief Engineer; I think you just said you didn’t need to watch over this process,” she told him.

  “I could be spared for some of it,” Kellers said carefully. “What were you thinking?”

  “Well, you were kind enough to grab that copy of Estrellas del Destino, so I went looking around here to see what I could find,” she said. “Did you know that the station hosts a Spanish-language community theater?”

  “No, I have to admit I didn’t,” he replied, his smile threatening to turn into a grin of his own. “Did you happen to find out what they’re putting on right now?”

  “A dinner-theater version of an old musical about Argentina. Evita, I think it was called?”

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen that one live,” Kellers allowed. “And dinner as well?”

  Maria glanced around his office and the scattering of coffee cups—and lack of plates.

  “They have a midnight showing, starting in about two hours,” she told him. “If, you know, you haven’t eaten yet.”

  That got an outright laugh out of him as he studied the same collection of dishes she’d been eyeing.

  “I think you’ve got me in more ways than one,” he admitted. “All right, Maria, let’s go see this musical.”

  “I’m going to go change,” she told him. “I’ll see you in an hour?”

  “It’s a date,” he promised—and from the look in his eyes, he knew exactly what he was saying.

  The show was, frankly, terrible.

  At least three of the actors, including the woman playing the lead, weren’t native Spanish speakers and it showed. The performances ranged from actually impressive to downright atrocious, and the inconsistency almost made it worse than it would have been if all the performers were bad.

  The food was better than Maria had expected, and the company turned out to be even more pleasant than she’d hoped. They spent the evening conversing in Spanish, struggling where her Brazo-Portuguese and his Amber-post-secondary Spanish didn’t line up, but the struggles were merely excuses to laugh and clarify in English.

  By the time they left the show, Maria was feeling confident enough to grab James’s hand. He said nothing, only squeezing her hand in return as they made their way through the station’s corridors.

  Finally, still short of their ship, he stopped. He didn’t let go of her hand, though, and Maria smiled as she turned to face him.

  “Well, James?” she asked.

  “This is nice,” he admitted, squeezing her hand again, “but I’m not sure where this is going. I don’t exactly think I’m your type, Maria.”

  “You’re not,” she agreed with a smile. “Which, given my history with ‘my type,’ is probably closer to a recommendation than anything else. I think it’s safe to hope that, at this point, you’re not planning on betraying the ship.”

  James chuckled, still holding her hand and smiling at her.

  “You have picked some winners, haven’t you?” he said cheerfully. “What does that make me?”

  “What do you want it to make you?” Maria asked, stepping in closer to him. He opened his arms and was suddenly holding her as she rested her head against his shoulder. “I’m…more than willing to give it a shot. Maybe something more solid. I can’t predict the future, though.”

  “No one can,” he agreed. “I’ve just watched the past, and we know each other pretty well by now, don’t we?”

  “I think so,” she hazarded, suddenly uncertain for the first time in a while. God, what was she doing?

  Then he was looking into her eyes and it didn’t matter as they kissed for the first time.

  27

  Kelly had been an engineer before she’d been an executive officer, and her “soft skills” still sometimes lagged behind where she thought they should be. Her captain didn’t complain, but she was aware of the shortfall herself and working on it.

  Realizing that something had happened between James Kellers and Maria Soprano was well within her ability. All of Red Falcon’s senior crew were like family, and she knew them all. The pair had always been friends, like everyone else, but now they were sitting together around the conference table—much like she and Mike Kelzin were.

  Soprano’s flush when Kelly arched an eyebrow at her, barely noticeable against her skin as it was, confirmed Kelly’s suspicions. That, for now, was as much as Kelly needed to get involved. XO or not, this wasn’t a warship, and both merchant ships and covert ops ships trusted their people to be adults.

  If problems arose, well, there was a reason Kelly LaMonte had spent at least some of her time in Tau Ceti taking counseling courses.

  Rice was the last to arrive to the meeting, and he’d pushed the regular morning get-together back two hours already.

  “Sorry, people,” he said briskly as he took his seat. “Our MISS friends managed to pin down a cargo for us, but we had to leap on it immediately. We now have said cargo, but it took up more of my morning than I expected.”

  “When do we start loading?” Kelly asked instantly. If things were running on that tight a timeline, it might cause problems for Kellers’s repairs.

  “Tomorrow evening,” Rice replied. “The urgency was to make sure we were the ones to step up when the original shipper fell through. The first shipper was a big interstellar, so if we wanted to get the cargo as an independent, I had to hustle.”

  Most ships with Red Falcon’s cargo capacity belonged to the big interstellar shipping organizations. Few of those would be going as far out as Condor which made it rare for them to find a full cargo.

  “As it stands, we now have a full
twenty-megaton cargo heading to the Condor system, where it’ll go into storage and be broken up into smaller shipments for the Fringe Worlds,” Rice explained. “Tau Ceti produces most of the satellites and space shuttles and similar high-tech gear for a lot of places, but partial cargos are a pain in the ass for the big industrial cartels.

  “So, this kind of shipment goes out. They contract with one of the big hauling lines and move ten, twenty, or thirty million tons of high-tech systems out to a MidWorld with good transshipping facilities, then break it down onto smaller ships like our old Blue Jay from there.”

  He shrugged.

  “We’re getting paid shit, almost ten percent under the market rate per container, so we have every reason to make this delivery quickly and find out what we can haul out of Condor. Jeeves’s main concern, however,” he continued with a smile at the covert ops ship’s gunner, “is that one of the cargo containers we’re getting won’t be from the client.

  “It’s coming from the Navy and it contains exactly one thousand Phoenix VIII antimatter drive missiles,” the Captain concluded.

  Kelly heard Jeeves inhale sharply. As she understood it, that was more missiles than Red Falcon’s internal magazines could actually carry—and the VIII was a noticeably superior weapon to the VIIs they’d been given before.

  “Obviously, we’ll still want to keep our magazines mostly loaded with the Rapiers,” Rice told them all. “But having several reloads of the best missiles in the Protectorate isn’t going to hurt.

  “We’ll also be getting a set of upgrade kits for Kelzin’s assault shuttles,” he continued with a nod to Kelly’s boyfriend. “I’ll leave getting them applied up to you and James, Mike, but they’re supposed to boost your stealth, ECM, and acceleration.”

  “I look forward to testing them out,” Kelly’s boyfriend said cheerfully. “Anything spectacular in them?”

  “Yeah. Have you heard of a crush compensator?” Rice asked.

  Kelzin looked confused, but everyone heard Leonhart inhale sharply.

  “Those are not supposed to be in civilian hands,” she hissed.

  “And it’s a good thing we’re not civilians,” the Captain replied. “For the rest of you, a crush compensator is a precharged runic artifact capable of neutralizing about six hundred KPS’s worth of kinetic energy at impact.

  “Once.”

  “They’re designed for assault boarding,” Leonhart noted carefully. “The shuttle itself ends up needing a million or two in repairs after you use the crush compensator, but the boarding team is fine.”

  Kelly understood her surprise. From what Xi Wu told her, there weren’t many precharged runic artifacts in the galaxy—most “magical items” required recharging by a Mage quite often—and the details of how they were built were a closely kept secret. It seemed Deng Kieshi had meant it when he said he’d make sure they had whatever resources they needed.

  “We have about forty-eight hours to complete the repairs, assuming you can work while we’re being loaded?” Rice turned to Kellers.

  “We can,” he confirmed.

  “That’s one hell of a load cycle if they’re not starting until tomorrow evening,” Kelly noted. “I presume we’re getting help?”

  “We’re going to be making a quick hop over to Prime Consortium’s loading facility tomorrow,” the Captain replied. “Their systems can load an entire spar’s worth of containers at a time. Each load isn’t necessarily fast, but when they’re loading fifty containers at a shot, it doesn’t need to be!”

  The loading facility was an entirely separate space station from the main orbitals of Tau Ceti e. It consisted of a large cylinder, with a small section at one end spun to provide gravity for the working crews of Prime Consortium, and the majority of its length a working space filled with massive robotic arms.

  “Red Falcon, adjust course by point five meters per second along vector fifty-two by one hundred,” a voice echoed in Kelly’s headset. A momentary burst of thrust from the forward thrusters provided the requested change.

  “That’s good, Falcon. Hold this course for another thirty-two seconds from…mark. Then slow to a full stop relative to the station.”

  She tapped the commands into the navigation console and watched the metal maw of the loading station consume her ship. They’d lined her up at a very specific angle and a very specific speed, and she could make out the docking cradle Falcon was heading toward.

  “And mark,” the voice said, at the same instant as her programmed deceleration kicked in. Their velocity was low enough, it took only two seconds to bring the ship to a complete halt, even at the relatively gentle acceleration they could risk inside the station.

  “That’s good,” the control station continued. “Hold position; we are initiating the docking cradle.”

  The spiderweb of gantries lifted away from the station “floor,” locking around Red Falcon to hold her in place. Kelly had a momentary feeling of being trapped, but a quick glance at her repeater from Jeeves’s tactical station was reassuring…for her.

  The charge status of the ship’s defensive turrets would have been terrifying for Prime Consortium’s traffic control staff even before they realized that Jeeves was drawing up a targeting sequence that would cut Falcon free from the docking cradle—and then use her battle lasers to cut a megafreighter-sized hole through the exterior of the space station.

  It was almost certainly unnecessary, but…she understood the paranoia.

  “Red Falcon, we are passing you over to cargo control,” the controller told her. “We’ll talk to you again in the morning. Welcome to Prime Consortium’s Allonsi Station.”

  “Thank you, control; holding for the transfer,” she replied. As she waited, she muted her mike and looked over Jeeves’s plans.

  “Efficient, if horrendously expensive for Prime,” she told him. “A little bit paranoid, though, don’t you think?”

  “This is the most locked-down we’ve ever been except for actual major repairs, and we get those done in Navy yards,” her ex-Navy and ex-gunrunner subordinate replied. “I trust the MISS verification on these guys, I do, but even paranoids have real enemies.”

  Kelly snorted, then a chime on her headset informed her that she had cargo control on the line.

  “This is Officer LaMonte, XO of Red Falcon,” she confirmed in response to a half-heard question. “Our spars are clear and we should be ready to begin loading.”

  “Understood,” a woman’s voice told her. “We have a single-container special package to deliver first; where do you want it?”

  That, presumably, was the missiles.

  “If we drop it at the core of spar A-1, will that cause problems in your loading?” Kelly asked. The spars were traversable, allowing access to the containers if needed, but the less distance they had to haul ten-ton missiles, the better.

  “If we hadn’t anticipated it, maybe,” the woman on the radio replied with a chuckle. “Don’t know what’s in it, didn’t ask, but figured you’d want it close to home. That’ll take us about twenty minutes to get set up, then we’ll start loading stacks onto your spars.” There was a pause. “I…recommend either really good earplugs or sleeping off-ship tonight, Officer LaMonte. This is not a quiet process for anyone, even with most of it in vacuum.”

  “We’ll find a way,” Kelly said with a chuckle. “We’ve been through worse.”

  It couldn’t, after all, be worse than actually having missiles hit the ship.

  Kelly was wrong. Missiles hitting the ship, for all of the terrifying implications and resounding tones of the impact, lasted only a few seconds.

  Cargo being loaded onto the spars was normally almost unnoticeable, with only a single container being added to a given spar at a time. There were a few seconds of a minor vibration that rang through the ship, but that was all.

  Allonsi Station’s loading equipment was something entirely new in her experience. The machinery moved ten-thousand-ton cargo containers like they were takeout boxes, sliding the
m around in batches of ten that were attached as one.

  It wasn’t a fast process, with the ten containers almost grinding into place on the hundred-and-twenty-meter-long spar. Every moment they were in contact, vibrations rang along the support structure into the ship, creating an awful noise in every compartment.

  Then it would stop as that set of ten containers was locked into place. But Falcon’s cargo spars each held fifty containers, and the next set would start mere seconds later.

  It took fifteen minutes to load the first spar. Five minutes to realign the equipment and bring up the next cargo load, then fifteen more minutes. A process that would normally take well over a day was scheduled to take roughly seven hours.

  Kelly grimly remained on the bridge to coordinate as it continued. She presumed, probably with more hope than reason, that the rotating gravity ring underneath Falcon’s forward protective dome was quieter, so she sent everyone else on the bridge to go rest.

  Someone had to be in touch with Allonsi Station’s logistics people throughout. Kellers’s engineers would be working too, so it wasn’t like her old job would have required less dealing with this.

  “How’re your ears?” Rice asked, the Captain suddenly right at her shoulder. Her surprised start clearly answered his question, and he chuckled.

  “Haven’t seen this kind of gear in play in a while,” he told her. “I forgot how loud it was.” He shook his head. “And this is why I never wanted to do the Core World runs most of the big freighters do. Any of the big thirty-million-ton ships doing those runs is being loaded and unloaded by facilities like this.”

  “I see why they suggested we go aboard the station during the process,” Kelly admitted. “But, well…paranoia.”

  Jeeves’s carefully written targeting plan was still active on her screen. If Prime Consortium decided to do something completely unexpected, Kelly could break Red Falcon free in short order.