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

by Glynn Stewart

  “‘Look like,’ huh?” she asked.

  “Someone walked into his office and shot him in the dead center of the forehead before he even said hello,” he said flatly. “They’d been allowed in past his security, and his guards weren’t there. Someone he trusted—and someone damn fast. As fast as you or Turquoise…possibly even faster.”

  “You think I—”

  “No,” David cut her off. “I know you didn’t. But a gene-mod or an Augment did. You did what we agreed, so here’s your money. Use it wisely.”

  “Does ‘spend every penny hunting down the bastards who killed Kovac’ count as wisely?” she asked.

  “Probably not,” he admitted. “These are dangerous waters, Ms. Indigo. Even for one such as you.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck,” she snarled. “You’re not what you said you were, Captain Rice, but I’m more than I appear too.”

  “I am exactly what I said I was,” he said mildly. “I am the Captain of Red Falcon. You are a member of a group of genetically modified women used by a Blue Star Syndicate regional boss as both assassins and a personal harem.”

  “You’re not just a merchant captain,” she said.

  “And I can guess what you are beyond a rogue gene-mod a long way from home,” David replied.

  His guess was that she was running a semi-criminal intelligence organization keeping an eye on la Cosa Nostra for anyone who’d pay, but primarily for Kovac and Turquoise. He wasn’t going to say that out loud, though.

  She got the unspoken message, too. They were both better off if they didn’t try and guess what the other really was.

  “Here,” he told her as he pulled a datachip out of his desk console and slid it over to her. “Gun and helmet camera recordings from his suite. Sanitized of all of our data, of course, but you might be able to get something useful about what happened from it.”

  Indigo took it, then looked up at David with dry eyes…that clearly were struggling to stay that way.

  “I know most wouldn’t believe it about a man like him, but he was a good man,” she said. “He got dragged into the muck and made the most of where he was stuck, but he was a good man.”

  “I never met him,” he replied. “And now I never will, so I’ll take your word for it. Be careful, Ms. Indigo…but good luck in your hunt.”

  It took LaMonte less than twelve hours to find a broker not merely willing to meet with David about a cargo to Sherwood but downright eager. They ended up meeting for breakfast at a quiet little restaurant near the docks, where the broker turned out to be a fussy little man with extensive dietary restrictions.

  Restrictions, it turned out, that the quiet little restaurant knew by heart to the point where the waitress was chorusing along with him as he listed off the changes to their house special.

  “No onions, no tomatoes, extra ketchup and mozzarella, no cheddar,” she concluded at the same time as him, winking at him. “We know the list, Benny. We’ll get it all taken care of.”

  “Thank you kindly,” Benny King told the girl, then turned his vague smile back on David and LaMonte. “So, Captain Rice, you want a cargo to Sherwood, I hear?”

  “We just got confirmation in that a cargo we’d been negotiating for will be waiting for us there shortly,” David lied smoothly. “We need to be on our way in about two days, but I hate running an empty hold. It’s a waste of my money, and there’s always someone shuffling cargo.”

  “Especially out of Condor,” King agreed. “I don’t know what people have told you about the system, Captain, but I need to make one thing very clear: I deal only in completely aboveboard cargos. I know perfectly well what kind of…rubbish gets shipped through my home system. I won’t touch it. I hope this isn’t a problem?”

  “Not in the slightest,” David said. “The last thing anyone wants is Martian entanglements, or even just local law enforcement. I just want cargo to haul to Sherwood. What can you do for me?”

  King leaned back in his chair as the waitress showed up and filled the mugs with coffee. Despite his particularity on the food, he had no instructions around the drinks and sipped the coffee black.

  David took that as a good sign but was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the coffee even so.

  “They grow coffee on Phoenix,” the broker told David with a smile. “There’s a roaster on McMurdo, and Gracie—the owner of this little place—gets her beans fresh each morning. Roasted and ground within twenty-four hours of it hitting your cup. It doesn’t get fresher.”

  It was very good coffee, and David took a larger swallow as he waited for King to rally his thoughts.

  “I can’t guarantee I can fill your ship,” he finally noted. “Not with two days. Loading alone would make that almost impossible, and it’ll take me most of today to even get anything headed in the direction of your ship. Depending on which of the usual suspects have cargos heading that way… I might be able to get you eight, maybe nine hundred containers.”

  “That’s more than I expected,” David admitted with a blink of surprise. That was almost half a cargo for his ship.

  “I might be able to pull it off,” King noted carefully. “I’ll get you something, I can promise that, but I’m guessing beyond that.”

  “What kind of cargo are we talking about?” David asked.

  The broker gestured at his coffee cup as their breakfasts arrived.

  “Lots of things, but a good chunk of what we sell to Sherwood is coffee,” he said with a grin. “Now, most of the cargo will be transshipments from Core Worlds, but I can pretty much guarantee you a megaton or so of coffee beans.”

  “Now, that, Mr. King, is a lot of coffee.”

  “More than even I can drink,” he agreed. “I charge a three percent commission of your cargo fee and a fixed fee per shipment to the shipper as well. Straightforward enough from your side. Do we have a deal?”

  34

  It said a lot about the smooth functioning of Red Falcon’s crew and the competence of their subordinates that Maria spent the runup to the jump into Taurus using James Kellers’s chest as a pillow. Neither of them needed to be on duty for something so “mundane” as magically jumping a full light-year into a Navy-secured no-fly zone.

  So, instead, she spent that time dozing on the chief engineer’s chest, marveling at the degree to which his muscles felt like steel cords wrapped in silk. As the energy wave of the jump swept over them, he woke up and looked down at her.

  “Enjoying the view?” he asked.

  She danced her fingers up his chest and grinned.

  “Immensely. Sadly, that jump means we’re in Taurus, which means we do actually need to get to work pretty quickly.”

  He sighed, which vibrated his skin wonderfully under her hands.

  “You’re right,” he agreed, but made no effort to start moving, just lying there looking at her.

  “What?” she asked, suddenly feeling self-conscious.

  “You ever wonder what we’ll do after this?” he asked. “I mean…I know David. He’s not going to be a spy forever.”

  That thought had honestly never occurred to Maria.

  “I’ve been expecting to die on one of these ops,” she admitted. “Long-term planning has never been my strong point.”

  He chuckled and laced his fingers into her hair. She leaned in to kiss him and then rested her head on his shoulder.

  “I…suspect I’m with either David or MISS for life, though,” she told him. “I was Navy until I fucked that up, and I’ll be MISS until I screw that up.”

  That was…more honest and whinier than she’d intended, and she felt his hand tighten gently against her.

  “You haven’t screwed it up yet,” he said. “And I can’t see you screwing it up, either. The instincts that got you in trouble in the Navy are the instincts MISS wants. Me…”

  He shook his head again, brushing his chin against her hair.

  “I always thought I’d be David’s chief of engineering until he retired,” he admitted.
“Didn’t want a ship of my own, didn’t have a plan beyond sticking with him. If he leaves MISS, though…don’t know if I will. Might need a reason to stay, though.”

  Maria took a long few seconds of silent thought to unpack that, then kissed his shoulder.

  “Be careful, you lug,” she told him. “Or I might think you were saying you’d go wherever I do.”

  Which was somehow much less terrifying than she would have thought.

  “Not anywhere,” he responded. “But if you’re going somewhere I might think about going, I’ll definitely think about going along. If you follow.”

  “I follow,” she said, and kissed him again. “For now, my dear, we need to actually get up. While we didn’t jump right into the Navy base, if we followed my calculations, there should be a destroyer showing up to say hello sometime in the next hour.

  “We should both be on duty when they arrive.”

  Maria stepped into the simulacrum chamber, checking the screens as she moved over to the liquid model, and nodded to Xi Wu.

  “Nguyen went and fell over,” Wu told her. “No active movement from the Navy base. Quiet so far.”

  Maria shook her head.

  “That’s not right,” she noted. Taurus’s smaller gas giant was the base for half a squadron of Royal Martian Navy cruisers. There should have been patrols around the planetary system, and someone should have pinged them by now.

  “Station looks live,” the younger Mage said. “The refinery is active, but I’m only seeing one cruiser. Aren’t there supposed to be more?”

  “There should be four, and a dozen destroyers,” Maria replied. “Our files are out of date but not that old.”

  “I’m seeing one cruiser, no destroyers,” Wu said. “Seems light for a Navy base.”

  “It is light,” Maria agreed. “I’ll buy the cruisers being deployed, but they wouldn’t have taken all of the destroyers. Which means…” She sighed and brought up the channel to the bridge.

  “Captain, we’re being stalked,” she told him.

  Rice looked at her for several moments, then nodded.

  “Of course. If they deployed most of the station’s ships somewhere, then the destroyers are stealthing around. I’d rather not go active, Maria,” he replied. “But if they’re stealthing, a hard radar sweep will show them.”

  “Plus, Jeeves should know the pattern they’ll follow,” Maria pointed out. “A civilian ship wouldn’t have the scanners to do it, either. Have we transmitted to the base?”

  “MISS authenticate codes went out ten minutes ago. They’ve received them; they just haven’t responded.”

  Maria managed to not, quite, visibly roll her eyes. She’d been on the other side of similar exchanges enough to guess what was going on.

  “They’re playing games,” she told him. “They know who we are, but they want to make us sweat because the whole concept of a covert ops warship is enough to make them damn grumpy.”

  Right now, Red Falcon wasn’t even flying her civilian transponder. All of her current transmissions identified her as KEX-12. Given the number of ships of her size and design around, it was a mostly pointless gesture, but that was why they were as far from Taurus’s inhabited planet as they could get.

  “Agreed,” Rice said. “Jeeves? If you were ghosting a Militia ship with an egotistical captain back when, where would you have put the destroyer?”

  The gunner chuckled.

  “That was a little above my grade, skipper,” he noted. “But…here or here.” Two zones flashed amber on the tactical display feeding to Maria’s screens.

  “I agree,” she said simply.

  “Pulse ’em. Read me their damn hull numbers. If they want to be rude, let’s return the favor.”

  The big freighter rotated slightly, almost imperceptibly, to align her main radar arrays with the zones where they guessed the destroyers would be closing. Strict emission controls and a little bit of amplified magic could go a long way to hiding even a starship in space, but it wouldn’t stand up to military-grade radar pointed right at it.

  To no one’s surprise, there was a destroyer in each zone Jeeves had flagged. The high-power radar pulses took just over thirty seconds to get back to Red Falcon, but they punched right through the magical cloak over the ships.

  “DD-104 and DD-126,” Jeeves reported calmly. He apparently had taken Rice entirely literally. “Warbook says Shining Defender of Liberty and Virtues of the Guardian.”

  “Send our MISS codes directly to them,” Rice ordered.

  “Incoming message!” LaMonte interrupted. “From Shining Defender.”

  A video transmission appeared on the main screen, mirrored to Maria’s screens in the simulacrum chamber. The woman in the image had skin as dark her black uniform, almost blending into the sharply creased uniform as she looked at the camera with a wry smile.

  “This is Mage-Captain Hanaa Okeke, commanding Shining Defender of Liberty,” she introduced herself. “My sensor chief reports a brand-new headache, which I have to consider fair play for the game we were playing. Welcome to Taurus, KEX-12. Defender and Virtues will match velocity with you and escort you in.

  “Please behave and try not to give us any more headaches,” Okeke continued. “That pulse was fair game, but we’re under a degree of alert right now that’s making everyone twitchy.”

  When she’d served in the Navy, Maria had always wondered why they insisted on positioning so many of the major bases around gas giants and well away from the inhabited worlds they were ostensibly there to protect.

  The official reasons were all true, of course. That was where the fueling stations were, the cloudscoops that brought up vast quantities of hydrogen, and the heavily secured facilities where Mages transmuted matter into antimatter. The outer system was often easier to access, too, with fewer overlaid gravity wells for the Navy Mages to calculate around.

  But it was also true, she realized now, that part of it was just to be out of sight. Red Falcon couldn’t have just “dropped in” to the Taurus Navy Base if it had been in orbit of Gemini and under a billion-odd watching eyes.

  With the base positioned in a quiet corner of the system, they could tuck the big ship into the fueling station and take one of Kelzin’s shuttles over to the cruiser Huntress of Temptations while LaMonte handled restocking.

  Kelzin settled the shuttle down in the cruiser’s bay with precision, and the cruiser’s safety systems engaged. After a minute or so, it was safe to leave, and Maria followed Captain Rice out onto the cruiser’s deck.

  There was no formal welcoming party or grand display. They were a covert ops ship, after all, and while there was no hiding “KEX-12” from the sensor crews, only a handful of people needed to know who commanded the ship.

  “Captain Rice, welcome aboard Huntress of Temptations,” an elegantly turned-out man with long red hair and a black uniform greeted them. He had two companions, both with the insignia of Mage-Commanders. “I am Mage-Captain Andrew Verona, Huntress’s commanding officer and the current acting station commander for the Taurus Navy Base.

  “While I’ll freely admit to authorizing the games my captains were playing when you arrived, we are always at MISS’s disposal,” he continued with a small smile. “How may I assist you, Captain, Ship’s Mage?”

  Verona had a well-stocked wine cabinet and produced an excellent red wine as they took seats in his office.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, Mage-Captain, I though the Taurus system had more ships?” Rice asked.

  “Hand Ndosi had to borrow a few ships a couple of weeks ago,” Verona explained. “Not my place to say what she’d found, but she needed a few cruisers to help get things under control.”

  “Ah,” Rice allowed. “Do you still have couriers on hand after the Hand’s arrival?”

  Maria wasn’t familiar with the name Ndosi, but that wasn’t really a surprise. The identities of the Hands of Mage-King weren’t secret, but they also saw no reason to broadcast them.

  “She
only took one of them,” the Navy officer said. “I still have two couriers on hand. I suppose that’s the main thing you need, Captain?”

  “We need to update MISS on our current operations and get a message to Hand Lomond,” Rice said grimly. “There are certain…affairs in the Condor System that require a Hand’s touch, I believe.”

  Verona arched a carefully groomed eyebrow but didn’t argue.

  “I can put FN-2199 at your disposal for whatever message you need to send,” he confirmed. “Do we need to send her to an RTA or all the way to Mars?”

  Mars was at least a week’s flight away, but Maria saw David pause.

  “Both would be ideal,” she said while her Captain was thinking. “Immediate relay via the RTA of the basic information will enable action, but I think Mars needs our full reports and scan data.”

  “We can do that,” Verona confirmed. “Is there any additional assistance I can provide you? I doubt I need to know your mission, but while I’m short of ships, I can spare a destroyer if needed.” He grimaced. “Well, I can deploy my entire flotilla if needed, but that would leave Taurus defenseless.”

  “The offer is appreciated, Mage-Captain,” Rice told him. “But I think KEX-12 is capable of taking care of herself. We, ah, are carrying significantly more antimatter munitions than I think any opponent may expect.”

  “And a destroyer would attract attention we’re trying to avoid,” Maria added. “Our job is covert, after all.”

  “Of course,” Verona agreed. “Your XO has already sent over a list of supplies and parts you need, and we’re taking the opportunity to top up your fuel from the Mage-King’s stocks.”

  He offered his hand.

  “I can’t imagine you dropped into a Navy base because your job is being easy and convenient, Captain, Ship’s Mage,” he said. “Any assistance we can provide, we will. Beyond that, I wish you the best of luck.”

  “We appreciate it,” Maria replied as David shook the Mage-Captain’s hand. “As you say, we have a job to do. Answers to find. People to protect.”