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

by Glynn Stewart

  With a chuckle, David left her to it and stepped out of the meeting room into the hotel corridor. The two security troopers outside tentatively returned his smile as he nodded to them.

  “Ping Leonhart for me,” he instructed. “It looks like it’s briefing time.”

  “All right, Binici, what have we got?” David asked after Leonhart had shut the door behind them and regained their privacy.

  “Less than I was hoping,” the hacker admitted. “The good news is that it looks like la Cosa Nostra presence here is smaller than we expected. MISS files really don’t say much beyond that there is one, but the locals keep a closer eye on it.”

  “How small are we talking?” Leonhart said.

  “Not small enough to make this easy,” Binici replied. “But we’re looking at maybe fifty made men and ten times that in associates. That limits our potential targets, especially since we’re relatively sure our ‘Coral’ is from la Cosa Nostra.”

  “I thought they were running multiple operations here,” David said. There’d been the notes on kidnapping as well.

  “They were,” she confirmed. “Until about a year ago, when JSIB finally managed to pull together enough evidence to come down like a ton of bricks on the human-trafficking side. Looks like about half or more of the made men in the system got caught up in the sweep, and one of the major dons was ‘killed resisting arrest.’”

  “My heart bleeds for them,” he said drily. “So, they’re left with gunrunning and crystal theft?”

  “Most of what’s left seems to be focused on acquiring and smuggling gems and laser optics,” she confirmed. “JSIB seems to have that on a far lower tier. What I find interesting, though, is that according to their files, la Cosa Nostra doesn’t have a gunrunning operation here in Java. The system actually has quite strict gun control and doesn’t manufacture heavy weaponry at all. All shipments of weapons, aircraft, armored vehicles, et cetera are strictly controlled and only under government control.”

  “So, the weapons didn’t come from here. That doesn’t help us much,” David noted.

  “No. All I ended up with in the end was a list of the thirty or so made men on the station,” Binici warned him. “Which is, thankfully, more helpful than you might think.”

  “Well, I’m considering authorizing Leonhart to carry out a mass kidnapping and interrogation that can’t help but draw attention, so ‘more helpful’ is good,” he told her. If JSIB’s files couldn’t get them to Coral Drummond, this whole endeavor was starting to look more and more like a waste.

  “It turns out that the local dock records are significantly easier to acquire than JSIB’s files,” Binici told them, using her data gloves to toss a list of ship names and dates on the screen. “As an UnArcana world, Espresso obviously doesn’t have an RTA, so if our ‘Coral’ is organizing interstellar shipments, they’re sending messages by ship.

  “We know when the courier drops and messages were heading this way from Sherwood for Gorman’s orders, so I cross-referenced those arrivals with ships that left within seventy-two hours.”

  A number of names turned green on the screen and others disappeared.

  “I then looked for people and companies that showed up more than others and cross-referenced those with the list of made men.”

  Some of the names stayed green. The rest disappeared, and new data appeared around them: contracting companies, ownership, more names…

  “Three different companies,” Binici concluded. “All majority-owned by the same shell…a shell that shows up in JSIB files as being managed by one Gianna Antoni. JSIB has her flagged as a made woman of la Cosa Nostra, but they have no idea what she does for them.”

  “Brokerage of interstellar smuggling would be hard for the locals to identify, wouldn’t it?” David murmured. “Well done, Binici. Well done.

  “Do we have a location?”

  “I know what trading firm she works out of,” the junior Marine said. “Looks like it’s a combined office and apartment, so I’d guess she lives there, too.

  “Well, then.” David turned to Leonhart. “You brought those stealth suits, I assume?”

  “We did,” she confirmed. “I even had one sized for you. Shall we go hunting?”

  “You read my mind, Rhianna.”

  45

  The stealth suits were sneaky but not unobtrusive. They helped the wearer blend into walls with a layer of active chameleon camouflage and absorbed radar and so forth, but the armored full-body suit didn’t blend into crowds well.

  Fortunately, they packed easily into duffle bags, and David and his Marines made it through the station to the mixed-use area their target worked and lived in without incident. Changing into the suits in the quieter section of the station, they rapidly transformed into anonymous blurs against the walls.

  Even the blurs faded as the Marines moved out. They had a far better idea of how to move in the gear than David did, though even his untrained movements were nearly invisible against an unchanging background.

  Micropulse transmitters and a well-designed heads-up display kept David aware of where the other members of his team were, despite their cloaks of invisibility. Rhianna Leonhart led the way, the Forward Combat Intelligence Marine the best qualified with the gear and for the mission.

  “Security is active,” she noted softly. “Binici?”

  The electronics expert moved up, at least according to David’s HUD, and a panel on the wall moved away. As the background began to move, the Marine became more visible, but there was no one around to see right then.

  “Active, expensive, and crap,” Binici concluded after a few seconds. “Someone definitely paid a lot of money for this. Shame the installer didn’t bother to set up a system for the software updates.”

  There was a click and the side door to the office unlocked.

  “Let’s go,” Leonhart ordered.

  Two Marines stepped through the door, then David and Leonhart, then the last two Marines. David didn’t miss that he was being surrounded and guarded, but that was also part of his people’s job.

  The area they’d entered was a cubicle farm, a style of office that had never quite gone away over the last half a millennium or so. It was quiet and empty, and David scanned the room for exits.

  “Do we have a floor plan?” he asked.

  “Oh, we have one,” Leonhart confirmed. “It says this is a corridor with side offices. Someone renovated and didn’t tell the station staff.”

  “Where do we go, then?” he asked.

  “There should be an apartment attached to the office over there,” Binici told them, using her suit to drop a waypoint on everyone’s HUDs. “It’s late enough that no one should be working, but Antoni does live here; she might be home.”

  “Let’s move,” Leonhart ordered, suiting actions to words and leading the way toward the waypoint.

  The office portion of the unit had been opened up significantly from the layout they had, with all but one set of individual offices cleared away to create a large open-plan office. The entrance to the apartment shown on the floor plan was completely missing.

  There was, in fact, no sign that the apartment the station schematics showed being attached to the office was there at all. Just smooth walls where the doors should be.

  “Scan for entrances?” David suggested. “They’re either still there and hidden or moved around to somewhere else.”

  “I’m guessing hidden,” Leonhart agreed. “Binici?”

  The electronics tech gestured for one of the other Marines to join her as she pulled a roll of small sensors on a tape strip from inside her gear. Unrolling it along the wall, they taped it at chest height to cover the entire section where the apartment should have connected, and then Binici hooked it into her suit’s computer.

  “All right, what secrets are you hiding?” she murmured. “And…there you are.”

  She highlighted the door on the team’s HUDs. It wasn’t where it had originally been. When they’d concealed the acce
ss to the apartment, they’d moved the door about two meters over to make it harder to find.

  Its main security had clearly been its invisibility. It took Binici under ten seconds to pop the concealed entrance open. It swung wide, revealing a complete lack of light on the other side.

  “Conroy, Victor,” Leonhart said quietly, using names in lieu of orders.

  They went through the door in the same order as they’d entered the apartment, with David and Leonhart in the middle as they swept the apartment entrance.

  All of the lights were out and a chill ran down David’s spine. There’d been no sign of trouble in the front office, but this was starting to seem eerily familiar.

  “Lights?” he asked softly.

  “IR lights, people,” Leonhart ordered in response. The suit’s optics were able to pick up the invisible light, and the room “lit up” in gray and white.

  The entryway looked like it was tastefully decorated with a small quantity of artwork that the infrared lights weren’t enough to show clearly. There was no one there, and the Marines moved forward.

  “Apartment seems to mostly match the station blueprints,” Binici said quietly. “Office should be over there.”

  A new waypoint appeared and David set off for it immediately. The IR lights showed him what he needed to see as he stepped around the furniture and reached the indicated door. There was no sign of life anywhere in the apartment, and he was grimly certain what he’d see when he pushed the office door open.

  If he hadn’t been wearing the suit mask, he’d probably have smelt the problem before he stepped in. The woman in the office had done more than the other victims David had found. She was sprawled backward across her desk with a heavy pistol still in her hand.

  With a sigh, he stepped up to the desk to examine the body, popping the face mask and pulling out a regular flashlight to take a closer look.

  “I wondered,” a voice suddenly echoed in the darkness. “The timing for Red Falcon’s arrival was suspicious, with everything that had been going on, but command was so sure that you were a usable contact, that your war with the Legacy had been personal.”

  David’s flashlight turned toward the speaker and he found himself looking up at a heavyset stranger who smiled down at him.

  “But if you’re here, Captain Rice, then we were wrong and you are MISS,” he continued as he produced a pistol from nowhere.

  Bullets smashed into the door behind David as he dove for cover behind the desk. Taking the mask off earlier wouldn’t have helped. It would have taken a few hours for the smell of death to permeate the space.

  And Gianna Antoni’s killer was still there.

  Cover only helped so much, and fire seared David’s scalp as a bullet tore through his hair, shredding the hood of the stealth suit. More gunfire answered as his own people responded by charging in and producing guns.

  He wasn’t sure where the second hostile came from, the stranger wearing a stealth suit of similar design to theirs. The hostile appeared from the wall and produced a gun of their own, opening fire into David’s Marines.

  Leonhart was in the lead, and she went down hard as bullets slammed into her. Her own fire went wide and David forced himself to lean over the cover with his own gun.

  He shot at the newcomer, who seemed to have dismissed the Martian captain as out of the fight. David’s bullets hit home and the stranger recoiled—before returning fire, seemingly uninjured.

  David’s focus had been on the wrong target. As his fire hammered the second hostile into the wall, the original agent vaulted the desk to land next to him. An impossibly fast foot swept his legs out from under him, and an open palm flashed toward his face.

  Falling on the ground freed David to use his cybernetic leg to its full potential. His hip had been reinforced to allow him to use its strength, but there was only so much he could do while standing without preparation.

  From the ground, he kicked his attacker. The stranger’s gun went flying and his arm should have broken.

  It didn’t. Both of the men they were facing were Augments. That wasn’t really a surprise, but it was a problem. David fired the last rounds in his gun at the attacker, who simply ignored the six-millimeter rounds as they hit his chest and charged again.

  Just the velocity of the rounds should have had some effect, but the Augment powered through, grabbing David’s hand and pinning him as he smashed his open palm successfully into David’s face this time.

  David had enough time to be confused before the electrodes embedded in the Augment’s palm sparked out and jammed into his face. Electricity blasted through him and pain wracked his body.

  He went black for what was probably only a few seconds, but the gunfire had stopped when he was aware of things again. He started to move—and the Augment’s taser-augmented palm struck him again.

  It was a lower charge this time, just enough to send his muscles into useless spasms as manacles clipped around his wrists.

  “You and I are going to have a long chat, Captain Rice,” his captor said softly. “And, well, I suspect it’s going to be a problem for your ship when the local police arrive to find that your people stormed a trade brokerage and murdered a respected citizen.”

  David couldn’t speak through the electricity still rippling across his body. He was yanked to his feet by the inhumanly strong Augment and stared around the room. Stealth-suited bodies were hard to make out, but he could see where Leonhart had fallen.

  He was dragged out past the body of another Marine and saw the other Augment already beginning to set the stage for the deception they’d use his people’s bodies to solidify. He didn’t know what tools the presumably LMID agents had, but he suspected that the scene would definitely match the scenario his captor had described.

  His people would be blamed for Antoni’s death…and the locals were already being hostile.

  46

  David’s captor was a professional. There was a fine art to hustling a manacled prisoner through public spaces without drawing unwanted attention, and the Augment had apparently mastered it. David had expected to be able to raise some havoc and try to escape, even if the wooziness from his head injury might have impeded him.

  Instead, he rapidly found himself locked into the side room of a small rental apartment. Both the side room and the living room he’d been dragged through had that spartan look only places with no long-term residents could have.

  He took a moment to be glad they’d ditched their wrist-comps at a public locker when they changed into the stealth suits. The combat gear had specialized computers—ones that intentionally lacked any real long-term storage.

  His wrist-comp wouldn’t be easily cracked, but its contents would reveal more of MISS’s secrets than he was comfortable with. Most of those secrets were in his own brain, but software didn’t die if you interrogated it too hard.

  Given that his untreated head wound was still oozing blood when he touched it, David wasn’t sure how well he’d survive under the interrogation his captor clearly planned. He wasn’t utterly convinced that he would die before he revealed anything, but he certainly wasn’t intending to give up.

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d been left manacled and sitting on the bed before the stranger came back in, a smirk on his face as he tossed David a warm, wet cloth that he barely managed to catch.

  “Clean yourself up; you can’t answer my questions if you’re concussed,” he barked.

  David looked down at the cloth, sighed, and dropped it on the floor. He stared back at his captor wordlessly and the Augment chuckled.

  “Your heart rate is elevated but your blood pressure is fine,” he told David. “You don’t show any signs of a concussion and the blood loss is slowing. You’ll live to answer my questions—and you’ll find the next few days much less unpleasant if you do.”

  Of course the Augment had enough sensors for him to be able to assess David’s health at a glance.

  “I know who you are,” the cyborg continued. “
Captain David Rice, captain of Red Falcon, once of Blue Jay. You’ve made both friends and enemies over the years, and, well, some of those friends are going to be very sad to learn which side you’ve chosen.”

  He shook his head.

  “But my intel says someone has been chasing the loose ends I’ve been tying up. Should have realized the time lag in the reports I was getting meant they were catching up—but then, lo and behold, you show up. So disappointing, Captain.”

  David said nothing. The more the stranger decided to monologue, the more likely he was to learn something useful. Sadly, that seemed to be the end of it as the Augment studied him.

  “So, I now know you’re MISS,” he concluded. “At least some of your people were either MISS or Marines…I’m guessing Marines; they may have died easy, but they were good, for all that. Who else is on your big, shiny ship, Captain?”

  There was no point in answering his questions. The best-case scenario, David suspected, was that answering the questions would get David hauled back to Legatus and stuck in a relatively comfortable cell.

  The more-likely scenario was that he got shot in the head.

  His silence earned him a thin smile.

  “Let me show you something,” the stranger said, pulling up his own wrist-comp and activating the holographic screen.

  It was running a news report, with footage of the office they’d been in barely an hour before. Dark green tarps were draped over the four bodies visible in the room as an announcer reeled off what they “knew.”

  “Police have identified the attackers as crew members of a ship visiting the Java System and believe that the Captain, one David Rice, was involved in the murder and escaped,” she reeled off. An image of David appeared on the screen.

  “David Rice is to be considered armed and dangerous, and all sightings should be reported to the JSIB tip line immediately.”

  The image turned off.

  “Java has the death penalty for murder, you know,” the Augment told him. “My friend set up some nice damning evidence. Open and shut, especially if your shuttle or ship crew resist. I figure they’ll shoot you well before your friends back home can try and intervene.