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

by Glynn Stewart

  “What concerns me,” LaMonte said quietly, “is the consistent comment from everyone that they haven’t heard anything from him recently. That sounds like he’s gone to ground, which would be a reasonable response to me if I heard MISS was hunting me.”

  “If he’s realized we’re MISS, we may have bigger problems,” David replied. “This is a man it’s been suggested we might simply be able to buy the details of his confidential clients from. If he knows who we are, he’ll sell that, too.”

  “And that will burn our cover completely,” Soprano agreed. “At least as far as those prepared to pay his fee…and there’d be enough.”

  “I don’t think he’s made us,” David admitted. “I think he’s just a paranoid bastard operating in a region that’s hostile to independent operators. A hostility we’re at risk of running into as well. We present as an independent shipper willing to take on any contract not involving slaves. La Cosa Nostra may well come knocking if we look too eager to work.”

  “There’s a bunch of big cargos coming into Condor, but not many that leave on that scale,” LaMonte pointed out. “I’m not sure I could find a single cargo our size heading out even if I was actually trying. My guess is that the big lines usually had a broker who preassembles a bunch of smaller cargos into one big lump before they arrive.

  “We can do that ourselves given enough time, but we can only justify burning money sitting here for so long before people start to question why we don’t just take the biggest job we can find and burn for deep space.”

  “Agreed,” David said. “And to do that kind of job, we need to know where we’re going…and until we can pick Kovac’s brain, we don’t.”

  “I suggest we pack a cargo for Tau Ceti,” Soprano put in, the Mage looking tired. “We can do that pretty slowly, but if it looks like we’re at least working on a cargo, we’ll attract fewer questions—and if we get a destination from Kovac, we can head via Tau Ceti.”

  “Our only excuse for talking to Kovac is that we need a big cargo,” the Captain replied. “If we fix a destination, we don’t have that option. No… Kelly, I want you to start looking for brokers. Take it slow and careful, be paranoid and picky. Interviews, track records, testimonials, the works.

  “If this doesn’t work out, we’ll have them put together a cargo for us, but I want to look available for at least a few more days. Can we make that happen?”

  David’s review of the files the local MISS office had provided left him with one significant conclusion: he really didn’t want to spend a minute longer in McMurdo Station than he needed to. The Principality of Condor was a nice-enough system and he understood the planets to be decent places filled with kind, energetic, and thoughtful people.

  McMurdo Station had the same appearance on the surface, but the no-questions-asked nature of the way the Principality allowed the transshipment businesses to run had resulted in a very different undertone.

  There was as much glitz and glamor to McMurdo as any space station had, and the locals had mastered the cleanliness and efficiency only money could afford. Scratch the surface of where that money came from, however, and you started to feel dirty.

  Drugs, guns, pirate ships, slaves, untaxed or unregulated goods… Condor wasn’t just a major shipping hub in la Cosa Nostra’s pocket; it was the center of la Cosa Nostra’s interstellar shipping operation. They’d operated out of a dead system once, until one David Rice had semi-accidentally led a Hand there.

  Now, apparently, they were operating out of someone else’s system where everyone was basically winking at the situation. The station police were owned and the system police simply let the station fester.

  A knock on his door dragged him gratefully away from the briefings, and he buzzed it open. Maria Soprano stepped quickly in, grabbing a seat before he could say anything and sighing.

  “You look like you just found shit in your coffee cup,” his Ship’s Mage told him.

  “Reading up on la Cosa Nostra operations here,” he admitted. “I can see the logic the MISS is using not to burn this place out, but I sure as hell find it questionable.”

  “Yeah, I missed the slave through-trade on my first read,” she said. “I can’t help but feel it was missed from the executive summaries intentionally.”

  “The right hand likes keeping an eye on the scum and is worried that the left hand might actually, I don’t know, try and free the fucking kidnapped kids?”

  David’s coffee cup went flying across the room in a spasming movement, shattering against the metal wall and leaving a smear of cold coffee dregs down the side of his office. The slave trade was what had dragged him into his entire mess with the underworld in the first place. He’d taken a job without asking questions, realized he was shipping slaves, and sold out an entire Blue Star Syndicate facility to the Navy and local cops.

  He could justify drugs and guns and tax-evasion smuggling to keep his cover up. Barely. Now MISS wanted him to turn a blind eye to human trafficking, and he wasn’t sure he could do it.

  “And what can we do about it with one ship, four Mages and forty-odd Marines?” Soprano asked gently. “Because let’s be honest, David—if you order it, Leonhart and I will storm McMurdo Station while Jeeves and LaMonte blow anyone who challenges us to hell, but I don’t think that’s a battle we could win.”

  “But you’d try anyway, wouldn’t you?” he said drily.

  “To wipe out a tumor of slavers? In an instant.”

  David laid his hands flat on the table.

  “I can’t,” he whispered. “They didn’t give us enough data—and that has to be part of why.”

  “I’m not entirely impressed with them myself, right now, but I suspect they really do think they can do more good this way,” Soprano told him.

  “I…don’t believe that,” David replied. “I can’t believe that.”

  “I happen to agree. And I’m not sure I trust them, either,” she said.

  “Why not?” he asked. “I mean, this”—he gestured at the data on his screen—“is a nightmare, but it’s one they can at least pretend is to serve the Protectorate.”

  “Because after thirty-six hours, they’ve given up on finding Kovac,” Soprano said grimly. “They apparently haven’t turned up the slightest sign of him and have concluded that he must have left the station without them realizing it.

  “Which I sadly find far too believable, given that the man would also be evading la Cosa Nostra, which seems to be everyone else’s focus on this station.”

  “But that seems a little quick to give up, doesn’t it?” David murmured.

  “If nothing else, I’d expect them to be able to find where the man was on the station before he left, but they have no idea,” she said. “Something stinks. I’m not entirely sure it’s the local MISS, but they’re not helping.”

  David looked back at his data and smiled grimly.

  “Well, if they’re not going to be useful, then I feel much better about throwing them to the wolves,” he admitted. “Or, more accurately, the Hands.”

  “David?” His Ship’s Mage looked at him questioningly.

  “Stealey may be gone, but I still know how to get ahold of Hand Lomond,” he reminded her, his smile growing both wider and thinner. “Let’s see what the man they call the fucking Sword of Mars thinks of this mess.”

  David had barely stepped into the bar when a long set of fingers ran lovingly up his shoulder and onto his face.

  “Good to see you, lover,” Indigo purred in his ear. “Good to see you can keep an appointment! Shall we grab a table?”

  He hadn’t made any appointments to meet the woman that he recalled, though he had stopped in there in the hopes of getting some kind of information from the last chance he figured they had of finding Kovac.

  David gestured her to a table and got an eyeful of tonight’s outfit as she walked by him to lead the way. It looked more like a net over a loincloth than anything that most worlds would regard as decent.

  Indigo was d
oubling down on the streetwalker act, and her actions toward him were almost certainly intended to set a very specific tone to the rest of the bars’ occupants.

  She added to that impression by waiting for him to sit and then draping herself into his lap.

  “You, Captain Rice, have an interesting choice of potential business partners,” she whispered in his ear. “I’ve made the link to Kovac for people before and it’s been a lucrative, if pain-in-the-ass, proposition.

  “Now…I wonder if you know what you’re getting into.”

  “Well, I’m not paying for you to shove your chest in my face,” David pointed out delicately as Indigo proceeded to do basically that.

  She chuckled. Given her position, it was a little distracting even as he was trying to stay in control of the situation.

  “The men who try to pay for that generally don’t like what they do get,” she told him. “Look, Kovac has gone dark. I mean really dark. I can’t find him…and I can find anyone.”

  That was a disturbing-enough statement to get David’s attention fully on business at last, and he sighed.

  “I need to find him,” he said, knowing damn well he was admitting that he was looking for more than just a job from the man. “We agreed to a lot of damn money, Indigo.”

  “I know,” she breathed in his ear. “I’ve got something. More than anyone else would have found. Now I’m going to slap you and storm out. Meet me in an hour at the location I just air-dropped to your wrist-comp. Bring the money.”

  Before David could say anything either way, she recoiled from him and slapped him across the face.

  “That’s it?” she half-shrieked, half-yelled. “That isn’t enough to cover this conversation, let alone what you want!”

  She was fast. Hell, given what David suspected about her and her relation to Turquoise, the catlike grace she showed as she leapt away from him and stormed out of the bar was her holding back.

  His own augments were sufficient that he could have caught her, he supposed, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to break off their meeting in a way that didn’t draw suspicion—and David using his cyber-lung to supercharge his bloodstream with oxygen and then leap off with his cybernetic leg would wreck that.

  He let his momentary dazed expression last long enough to help convince the rest of the bar patrons of her act, then slowly rose.

  “Ah…bartender?” he said slowly. “Tab, please?”

  And then he realized he hadn’t even ordered anything before Indigo had arrived.

  32

  Indigo hadn’t said turn up alone—and even if she had, David probably would have ignored her. He didn’t trust the bodyguard turned information broker further than he could throw her. He brought Soprano and four of Leonhart’s Marines.

  He and the Marines were armed too. The Macy-Six he wore under his shoulder was an old friend, a six-millimeter caseless pistol built on Mars. The Marines carried its big brother, the Martian Armaments Caseless Close Assault Weapon, Nine Millimeter—the MACCAW-9.

  Or the death parrot, when the troops were being irreverent. Which was most of the time.

  Soprano wasn’t visibly armed, though she’d dressed in a high-collared tight blouse that both concealed her Mage medallion and probably qualified as an area-effect testosterone-poisoning system.

  Exposure had rendered David immune to his Ship’s Mage’s efforts in that direction, at least. Pointed experience had rendered him resistant to people using beauty as a weapon in general. The lawyer turned crime lord who’d chased him across the galaxy had been absolutely gorgeous, after all.

  And there were Indigo and her “sisters.” The information broker materialized out of the shadows when he reached the time and place she’d indicated. She’d traded the fishnet dress for a military-grade bodysuit more commonly found on recon teams.

  Two more women and a man accompanied her. All were dressed in the same bodysuit and carrying the Legatan–built equivalent to David’s MAC-6. Unlike Indigo, her companions had the hoods on the suits up and the face-shields on. They were anonymous…but the women, at least, moved with the same deadly grace as Indigo.

  How many hyper-sexualized assassins had Conner Maroon had? How bloody stupid did you have to be to think that was going to end well for you?

  Indigo and her companions brought the number David knew of to five, though he was sure that Turquoise had more sisters he hadn’t seen. He supposed it was possible that they’d taken the template and made more like them, but…that struck him as unlikely.

  Few people with a brain made their custom-gene-sculpted assassins that top-heavy, after all.

  “You have the money?” Indigo asked as she surveyed David and his people.

  “Maybe,” he said bluntly. “I’m not seeing Kovac around here.”

  “Fine. Follow me,” she snapped, and set off without waiting to see if he responded. David fell in behind her as she led the way deeper into one of McMurdo Station’s nicer residential zones. This wasn’t a section for the truly rich, but it was the kind of place where a starship’s captain might keep a home.

  Captains didn’t spend that much money on houses, since they’d usually want them in three or four systems, so the relatively affordable luxury of a zone like this worked well. It was the haunt of the aspirational upper middle class, the lower upper class, and the rich who didn’t want to draw too much attention to themselves. The corridors were double-wide and double-high, and small artificial oases of greenery marked the intersections.

  Eventually, Indigo stopped at one of the oases and gestured toward a side corridor.

  “Six homes in that corridor,” she told him. “One belongs to Kovac. He never kept a permanent office, always using rental spaces once or twice and abandoning them. I had a drop-code for him, but he never responded, so I tracked this down.”

  “How come you can find it and no one else can?” David asked.

  “Because when I arrived on this station with nothing, I was his paid companion for six months to build up contacts and money,” Indigo said bluntly. “This is the only place I can track that hasn’t changed ownership since then, and I think it’s his actual home.”

  “That’s a lot of supposition for me to go off of,” David told her. He was also surprised that she’d be willing to sell out an old client of that much weight and caliber. On the other hand…

  “It’s all you’ve got,” she replied. “It’s all anyone’s got, which means I have no idea what you’re going to find in there. Probably nothing, to be honest, but I said I’d find you Kovac and this is the best I can do.”

  And she was worried for him but unwilling—or unable—to break into his house herself.

  “I’m not paying you the full fee for a house that might have Kovac in it,” David snapped.

  “Fine. Pay me half now, half if you find him,” Indigo offered. “Best I can do, Captain.”

  That was a concerning offer. She definitely seemed to think she’d get that second half, but she wasn’t sure.

  “All right,” he agreed, turning away from her to carefully count out the marked credit chips from the Bank of Olympus Mons. “Three hundred twenty-five thousand,” he said, passing her the chips.

  She took them and they disappeared into a concealed pouch on the bodysuit.

  “The unit at the end, number four. I’m out of here,” she told him. “I may not know what Kovac’s up to, but I can tell you this: the security systems on that suite are insane.”

  The locals disappeared with surprising speed, leaving David and his team alone in the space station version of a cul-de-sac. The advantage of neighborhoods like this was that there weren’t that many people living there compared to other parts of the station, so they were able to approach the unit without being questioned.

  The entrance to Kovac’s unit was a single plain door with a number on it. By the standards of the side corridor it was in, the door was positively plebeian. The other units had engraved archways, nameplates, and a dozen other decorations
.

  Kovac’s door had enough engraving and decoration to not look entirely out of place, but to David’s eye, that was the only reason the decoration existed. This was an apartment that was meant to go entirely unnoticed.

  “Check the door,” he told the Marines, one of whom promptly produced a scanner from inside her coat and started going over the systems.

  “Hermetic seal,” she reported. “Reads like an internal airlock on the other side, high-grade cybersecurity.” The Marine shook her head. “It may look nice and innocent, but I’d guess the entire unit is running on its own life support.”

  “Can you get in?”

  She grinned.

  “Of course we can.” She glanced down the corridor. “It won’t be quick, though. We may catch attention before we’re done.”

  “Do what you have to,” David ordered. “We’ll keep us safe.”

  He looked to Soprano.

  “Can you hide us?” he asked quietly.

  “Yes, but not for long,” she said. “Maybe wait until we actually have someone looking for us before we pull that rabbit out of the hat?”

  “You know your rabbits better than I do,” David said. “You picking up anything in the suite?”

  She shrugged.

  “It takes a pretty significant thaumic signature for me to pick it up at any distance,” she admitted. “I’m not sensing anything, but the place sounds pretty sealed tight.”

  From the cough from the working Marine electronics expert, Soprano was underestimating it.

  “Can you move the conversation further down the hall?” the tech asked plaintively. “This system is slightly better than military-grade, so a lack of distractions would be fantastic.”

  David knew better than to argue with experts and gestured for his Mage and the rest of his guard to follow him back towards the main intersection.

  “If anyone can get through, it’s Binici,” one of the other Marines told him quietly as they fell into guard mode at the entrance to the corridor. “Esra didn’t just pass the FCI’s electronics course—she maxed the test. Nobody maxes FCI course tests.”