“It’s in the job description,” her Captain agreed. “It is somewhat quieter on the hab ring. Everyone who can has retreated there for some reason.”
“Oh, good,” Kelly said. “I was hoping I was the only one going insane.”
“Not the only one, anyway,” Rice said with a chuckle. “I’ll take over, Kelly. You get to the hab ring and try and sleep. It’s not quiet there, but it is quieter and your sanity might recover a bit.”
“Three more hours, that’s all,” she replied.
“And I’ll handle them,” he assured her. “Four hours of this cacophony is enough for anyone. Even James is cycling people in four-hour shifts for the maintenance work right now.”
Silence washed over them as a spar finished.
“Prime isn’t going to try and backstab us, Kelly,” Rice concluded. “Not with an entire Martian fleet hanging out less than twenty minutes’ flight away. Go rest.”
28
For all of his assurances to his people, David still had to conceal a sigh of relief when Red Falcon cleared the exit from Allonsi Station. They were safe in Tau Ceti, but he’d learned never to underestimate a determined enemy.
He didn’t think they were currently being hunted, but he’d been wrong on that count before.
“Red Falcon, we show you clear of the safety margin,” the station controller told him. “You are clear to bring up your main engines. It’s been a pleasure.”
“My crew’s aching ears suggest a different description,” David suggested with a smile. “Thanks for the help, Allonsi.”
“Strangely, I’m sure I’ve heard that complaint before! Clear skies and happy trails, Red Falcon.”
Still smiling, David brought up Red Falcon’s engines and directed the big ship toward the edge of the system. He tagged a channel that linked him to all of his senior officers.
“If anyone has a reason we shouldn’t be heading straight to Condor, speak now or hold your peace,” he told them. “We’re already moving at ten gees, so turning around will become hard pretty quickly.”
“I might have left the stove on,” Kellers quipped.
“I think I left my boyfriend behind,” Leonhart added.
David snorted.
“James, your stove is aboard Red Falcon,” he pointed out. “Rhianna…isn’t your boyfriend in Sol?”
The security chief purred into the radio.
“One of my boyfriends is in Sol,” she told them. “Don’t worry; I wasn’t trying to sneak anyone aboard. We should be good to go. I’m liking my shiny new toys.”
Those included, from the list David had seen, everything from the assault-shuttle upgrades to several new, super-classified sets of stealth armor. They weren’t up to the damage absorption or strength boost of combat exoskeletons, but they were supposed to allow the wearer to hide from both electronic sensors and eyes.
David would believe it once he’d seen it in action.
“Anyone else want to be a smartass?” he asked, smiling at the joking. Morale was good. They’d done a damned good thing at Darius and they’d done it well, leaving an entire corporate security fleet looking like suckers.
His people deserved to be proud of themselves.
“Nguyen is on duty and ready to jump once we’re clear,” Soprano replied. “I don’t see any reason to stick around, much as I like Tau Ceti.”
“Then we’re on our way,” David said. “Next stop, the Principality of Condor.”
It had been a long time since Maria had woken up and not been alone in her bed. It took her a moment to even recognize why there was a warm lump under the blankets with her, and then she turned on her side to smile at the muscular black man asleep next to her.
It turned out that the ship’s engineer was a major cinephile, Spanish language not required, and both of them had rather eclectic collections of movies. They’d spent an enjoyable evening just going over the list and making plans as to which movies to watch…and then had got distracted before they had actually watched anything.
James continued to sleep, apparently unaware of her assessing gaze as she looked at him. Maria snuggled closer to him, and he adjusted to let her mold against his heavily muscled chest, seemingly without waking.
There was something different here, and she was a bit confused by it. As she’d told him, James was far from her regular type, but now that she knew he’d been interested, she could think of little gestures and hints he’d been dropping for at least six months.
He hadn’t pushed. Hadn’t probed. Just quietly sneaked inside her defenses and settled down to wait for her to notice. Now his arms wrapped around her, strong enough to carry her as he’d demonstrated the previous evening…and yet gentle enough that she was far from trapped.
She leaned against his chest, let her breathing sync with his, and continued to smile as she closed her eyes.
“I don’t think you have that aligned right,” Kelly said into a microphone as she studied the events in the shuttle bay. She leaned against the window of the control room, watching a sensor panel as Kellers’s team installed the upgrade kits for Kelzin’s shuttles.
“And why do you say that?” one of the junior engineers barked, the tired-looking youth not quite glaring up at the window.
“Because those panels are supposed to absorb radar, and the test micro-pulse I just fired at the shuttle got a signal,” she replied levelly. “Looks like we’ve got a misalignment between panels five and six; they’re lined up at the top but out by about three millimeters at the bottom.”
The grouchy engineer knelt down next to the shuttle and cursed.
“You got it, XO,” he confirmed. He carefully poked at the panel, then shook his head. “Damn it, looks like it got pulled when we installed one of the later panels. We’re going to have to yank this entire section and redo it.” A sigh echoed over the communicator. “Thanks, LaMonte.”
“Better it’s caught now than when someone is trying to find Mike to shoot at him,” she pointed out.
The engineer snorted and gestured his team back to him, and Kelly turned around at a noise to see Mike Kelzin entering the control room.
“I’m looking forward to what those kits will do for my shuttles, but I swear the Marines thought we’d have more gear for the refit,” he admitted as he looked over her shoulder. “How are we doing?”
Kelly interrupted the professional conversation to kiss him, then turned her attention back to the screens.
“We have six assault shuttles,” she said. “We’ve got two still up, two stripped waiting for upgrades, this one being worked on, and one complete.” She shook her head. “If I were you, I’d leave the two untouched ones untouched. We’ll be lucky to have four upgraded before we hit Condor.
“That said, we’ve got all the gear they’d have on a destroyer. The Marines just figured that they’d have the time and manpower to spare two team-days per shuttle.”
“And so do we,” he agreed. “We just have a time limit the Marines wouldn’t normally have.”
“Yeah.” Kelly studied the half-reassembled shuttle on the bay floor. “Like I said, I think we’ll have four upgraded to the new spec by the time we make Condor, but we won’t manage the last two.”
“Then we’ll leave Bay Three’s birds unstripped,” he agreed. “We shouldn’t need to make any assault landings in Condor. Stealth and discretion are the plan, right?”
“Stealth and discretion are always the plan,” she said. “But when are they ever the reality?”
29
Every star system had its own unique nature and complexities, and David found each of them fascinating in their own way. The Principality of Condor was no exception.
The beating heart of the system was the two inhabited planets: Phoenix, barely far enough from Condor to be habitable, and Penguin, barely close enough to Condor to be habitable.
At first brush, Phoenix was a planetwide desert and Penguin was a planetwide snowfield. Neither impression was correct, as both had significant tempe
rate zones and liquid water—and the areas too hot or cold for humans to live comfortably still had their own life cycles.
The single planet orbiting closer to the star than the habitable worlds, Albatross, was a true planetwide desert. A rapidly spinning ball of superheated rock, David’s files suggested Albatross had significant deposits of rare minerals…and that no one had yet judged them worth landing on Albatross to try and extract.
Not when Condor had the Emu and Ostrich Flocks, two massive asteroid belts that came close to being a single belt, dividing the habitable planets from the two gas giants at the edge of the system. Buzzard and Vulture provided hydrogen and other essential gases for industry, and the Flocks provided any mineral raw materials needed.
The Principality was rich and getting richer, held back only by the limited habitability of their planets. Most systems colonized in its round of the diaspora were still Fringe Worlds, but Condor was unquestionably a MidWorld.
A full twelve-ship squadron of export destroyers—Tau Ceti–built ships with jump matrices instead of amplifiers—were split between the two worlds as a pointed reminder of that status. A swarm of smaller home-built corvettes was scattered throughout the system, carrying out the usual High Guard duties of patrol and search and rescue.
The largest concentration of the corvettes was around the facilities at Penguin’s L1 point. A zone of stable gravity marked by the interface of Penguin and its oversized moon, Puffin, the L1 facilities were for the storage and transshipment of cargos that would never truly stop in Condor.
Those were the cargos the Prince turned a blind eye to because the fees helped sustain the fleet and military that protected his people. That complex was McMurdo Station, where Mahometus Kovac ran a gunrunning operation heavily linked to la Cosa Nostra.
“What’s our course, skipper?” LaMonte asked into the silence as everyone went over the same data he’d been consuming.
“Where do you think, XO?” David replied. “McMurdo Station. That’s where our cargo stops. That’s where our prey is hiding.”
He smiled.
“Let’s go hunting.”
Despite the scale of the area that was apparently labeled as “McMurdo Station,” the actual space station that bore the name was relatively small. The space around it was a crowded mess, and David was almost sitting on his hands to stop himself from taking control of the big ship away from LaMonte as she piloted them in.
Most of the cluster of orbitals were zero-gee facilities with limited living space or power, glorified anchor points for stacks of standard cargo containers. A couple of facilities that looked like cargo platforms or transshipment facilities showed their true colors to Falcon’s sensitive scanners.
Between the corvettes roving the exterior of the Lagrange point and the concealed defensive platforms, McMurdo Station was quite secure. David wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that several of the in-system ships floating around also bore concealed weapons installed by la Cosa Nostra.
The station that actually bore the name McMurdo was a hub-and-wheel design David had seen a dozen times before. Three rings spun to provide artificial pseudogravity, linked to a two-hundred-meter-long core for ships to dock at.
“You good, Kelly?” he asked quietly as he looked at the ever-shifting artificial reef around McMurdo station.
“Even the smallest gap is a good six kilometers across, skipper,” she told him. “I’m fine. We’ve got a docking slot at McMurdo, so you should be getting ahold of our client. Let’s get this cargo sorted, shall we?”
David chuckled at his XO taking him, ever so gently, to task. He’d chosen well when he’d decided to take a risk on Kelly LaMonte. She hadn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, been ready to be executive officer.
She’d succeeded at the job regardless.
Turning his attention to his part of the job and leaving her to pilot the ship, he directed Falcon’s computers to link in to the station network. Even on a normal ship, that was done through a heavily secured system. On Falcon, the external communications network was actually air-gapped from the rest of the ship’s computer hardware unless a connection was intentionally made.
If someone tried to poke into Red Falcon’s computers, they wouldn’t get far.
A few minutes of searching and he linked to the offices of the company they were delivering to.
“This is Caleb Dragoon Storage and Transshipment, Adrian Lionel speaking; how may I help you?” a delicately featured young man answered the video call.
“This is Captain Rice aboard Red Falcon,” David replied. “We are delivering a cargo for your company from Prime Consortium in Tau Ceti.” He listed off the shipment order and Lionel checked their system.
“Of course, Captain Rice,” he confirmed. “If you don’t mind my saying, the Prime cargos usually come in on Translight Interstellar ships. Do you know why it didn’t this time?”
“Translight had an unexpected maintenance casualty and didn’t have a ship available,” David told him. That said maintenance casualty had consisted of MISS outright bribing Translight to take a ship out of circulation for a slightly early set of repairs was an unnecessary detail.
“Reality intervenes for us all,” Lionel confirmed. “I’ll connect you to the younger Mr. Dragoon to sort out moving the cargo to our holding facilities. Please hold.”
The hold only lasted a few minutes before the screen resolved into a different man, somewhat older than the delicately featured Lionel, wearing a drab black business suit with a bright gold tie.
“Greetings, Captain Rice,” he said cheerfully. “I’m Kyle Dragoon, the Manager of Logistics for Caleb Dragoon S&T.” He grinned. “Caleb Dragoon is my father, before you ask.”
“Always a pleasure, Mr. Dragoon,” David replied. “So, I have twenty million tons of some of the most high-tech junk in the galaxy. Where do you want it?”
Dragoon faked a jovial wince.
“It’s not junk, Captain,” he replied. “But there’s definitely a lot of it. We’ll need to split it amidst several of our facilities, and we only have so much local transport capability. Usually, Translight lends us their shuttle fleet, but…”
“That wasn’t included in my contract,” David pointed out. “Plus, well, Prime paid us enough under market that I can’t really afford to burn the fuel for them, especially if I’m sitting in dock for longer than I expect.”
“Well, using your birds would get you out of dock faster,” Dragoon said, but the spark in his eyes said he knew exactly where the conversation could go. “I’m sure, now that I think of it, that we might be able to provide some sort of fee for the rental of your crews and birds…”
David returned the man’s almost-gleeful gaze and got down to the business of negotiating.
Safely docked with McMurdo Station, David pulled Kelzin, Soprano, LaMonte and Leonhart into his office.
“Okay, people, we’ve got two different tracks going on here, but I see no reason not to cross them over,” he told them. “Mike, we’re being paid a pretty decent fee for your shuttles to help off-load, so that’s going to be occupying you and your people’s time for the next few days. That said, that’s days of you flying back and forth through the heart of this cluster, so I want your sensors on full pickup.”
“The suites on the heavy-lift shuttles aren’t that great,” Kelzin warned. “Better than most civilian small craft, but still…not up to the assault shuttles’ standards.”
“We’re not flying assault shuttles around until we need to,” David told him. “But two or three days’ worth of data from the transport shuttles’ sensor suites adds up to a lot of data. I want them sweeping everything. They might not tell us anything we don’t already know, but more data won’t hurt.”
“Can do,” the pilot confirmed.
“Kelly.” David turned to his XO. “We can’t leave here until we’ve managed to track down Kovac—and we may have to leave in a hurry once we do. Not much you can do about the latter, but I need you to go
through the motions of looking for work while making sure we don’t actually get any.”
LaMonte snorted.
“So, jack our prices and look for at least fifteen megatons of cargo, check,” she noted. “Can’t see anybody out here looking to move that kind of mass.”
“I assume Translight probably has a deal with someone for shipments back to the Core,” David admitted. “We’ll want to be careful that we don’t find them, at least initially.”
His XO nodded.
“I’ll make us look productive while doing nothing,” she promised.
“Maria, Rhianna.” David turned to his Ship’s Mage and security officer. “You and I get to be spies. I want Maria to link in with the local MISS office, quietly, and get their files on Kovac. Rhianna, do the same with local law enforcement.”
“Do you want me to talk to them or hack them?” the Marine intelligence officer said bluntly. “There’s risks both ways, but…”
“Hack them,” David concluded after a moment’s thought. “We’re less likely to cross la Cosa Nostra’s radar that way, even if it might piss off some potential allies. Discretion is more important than making friends this time around.”
“And you, boss?” Soprano asked.
“I’m going to go trawl the underworld and see if I can look like an eager-enough potential gunrunner to cross Kovac’s radar,” David told them all with a grin. “That corner has to know we carry guns and other illegal cargos for the right price—and that there are things we won’t carry, too—so making myself visible in certain corners can’t hurt.”
“The faster we can move on all of this, the better,” Leonhart said. “It’s been two weeks since we left Darius. Nothing we did there should be a warning to Kovac, but my neck is itching. MISS is throwing a lot of resources at tracking back the cargos from Ardennes, and I can’t imagine that’s going completely unnoticed.”
Agents of Mars (Starship's Mage: Red Falcon Book 3) Page 18