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

by Glynn Stewart

  “So, you see David, your only way off this station is to cooperate with me.”

  David’s captor, who still hadn’t given him a name or even the remotest identifier, left after that. Presumably his intent was to let David stew, but the MISS agent instead started trying to assess the situation for ways out.

  The manacles were the biggest problem. The door looked sturdy enough, but he’d learned once before that he could break open just about anything with his cybernetic leg and a little bit of time. Of course, he’d need to somehow be sure that his captor wasn’t there.

  Time was another problem. If an “advise the police on sight” video was already being distributed of him, then Kelzin was almost certainly already being harassed and the odds were that threats were being sent to Red Falcon as well.

  He was still wearing the stealth suit, which was an asset. Even if he was missing the hood and face mask now, the suit itself was armored and had the chameleon weave and computers. He could use that to get pretty far across the station without being spotted.

  But it all boiled down to finding some way out of the steel manacles the Augment had slapped on him. He wasn’t a Mage and his cybernetics were limited. If he tried to use his leg to snap the manacles—theoretically possible, barely—he’d also probably break his wrists.

  He managed to get to his feet, pacing out the tiny room he was in and studying its features. No windows—not in a space station! One door. One bed. One dresser that quickly proved to be empty when David awkwardly checked the drawers.

  He was poking at the dresser when the door opened again and he heard his captor chuckle.

  “What, did you think I’d leave a gun or the key in there?” the Augment asked. “No such luck, Captain Rice.

  “Luckily for you, however, my orders have been updated,” he continued. “My superiors want you alive, without damage from interrogation. So, we don’t get to go to phase two and we do go find ourselves a starship.”

  “Where are we going?” David asked, as calmly as he could.

  His captor laughed.

  “Please, David. I’m not going to tell you that. Once you’re there and we can be sure you won’t escape, maybe someone will tell you enough to try and recruit you, but for now, well.” He grinned.

  “For now, it seems we both get to keep our secr—”

  There was no warning. One moment, the Augment was grinning at David and telling him everything had gone wrong.

  The next, his head exploded as gunfire echoed in the enclosed space and a burst of at least five bullets tore through the Augment’s skull. From the fact that the bullets hit the wall across the room and kept going, someone was using armor-piercing rounds.

  Someone it still took David a moment to even see, until Binici pushed her face mask up and entered the room he was locked in.

  “You okay, Skipper?” she demanded, the MACCAW-9 in her hands more visible than the rest of her.

  “A little bloodied up, but yes. Leonhart?” he asked.

  “Rhianna didn’t make it. Neither did Victor or Conroy,” she admitted. “Kavanagh made it back to the shuttle and picked up heavier guns while I tracked our new friend.”

  Even with the stealth suit, he saw her shiver.

  “We had to leave Rhianna and the others behind,” she whispered. “And…did you see the news?”

  “He showed it to me. We need to go.” David hated leaving people behind, but while some of his people were Marines, they were all spies. And like it or not, the Java System was now hostile territory.

  “Kelzin is warming up the shuttle and Kavanagh is running overwatch outside,” Binici confirmed, her voice brimming with forced confidence, then paused.

  “The locals are almost certainly going to try and stop us,” she admitted.

  “Then I hope you packed stunguns,” David told her. “Because fucked-up as this situation is, I do not want to add dead cops to the disaster.”

  “They’re with Kavanagh,” she said instantly. “I wasn’t going to count on them working on the Augment.”

  47

  With another Augment on the loose and the cops looking for them, speed was now the key more than anything else. There was another Marine with Kavanagh, wearing a long civilian coat over regular body armor. They’d only had so many stealth suits, and they’d brought even fewer aboard the shuttle.

  “Stungun,” David ordered grimly. The Marines handed him the weapon wordlessly and he checked its readouts. It had a full magazine of the computerized SmartDarts that were all but guaranteed not to kill a human.

  “What’s our people’s status?” he asked.

  “Everyone who wasn’t at the shuttle should have made it there by now,” Binici told him. “Local security hadn’t moved on it when we left, but given what’s hitting the news, they’re almost certainly heading in that direction.

  “Then we better get there first,” David said. “The best resolution to this is that we get the hell off this space station without even arguing with local police. Under no circumstances do we get ourselves in a firefight.”

  He shook his head.

  “This may be an UnArcana World and the local cops may be taking their marching orders from LMID, but they’re still cops and they’re still going after people they think are murderers. We are not stacking their bodies in the streets, understood?”

  “Hence stunguns,” Binici confirmed. “I’ve mapped out what I think should be a back route back to the shuttle, but it adds almost ten minutes. Or we can head straight there…we’ll be there in fifteen, but we’re almost guaranteed to run into cops.”

  David stared blankly at the nonlethal weapon in his hand. Unless the local cops were completely incompetent, they’d already been moving on Kelzin’s shuttle when the request to report his movements showed up on the news.

  Fifteen minutes or twenty-five, the cops were going to be there when they got there. Ten minutes, though, might make the difference between the cops posturing and attempting to negotiate…and riot squads storming the shuttle bay in gear that would ignore SmartDarts.

  “We can’t spare the time,” he said slowly. “We’re going to need to go straight there and take the risk. We don’t stop, we don’t answer questions, we try not to draw attention to ourselves…but we do not stop.”

  “Boss, you’re a floating head,” Binici pointed out. “Attention is going to be hard not to draw.”

  “Did you retrieve our gear?” David asked. “I’ll grab a coat like his.

  Covering the body armor with a coat would at least allow him to turn off the chameleon without looking like he was wandering down the corridors in battle armor.

  More than a coat would take too long. They needed to get off this space station.

  David rapidly concluded that he shouldn’t have even bothered with the coat. The four of them were moving forward at the brisk, determined pace every soldier in the galaxy learned sooner or later, and the crowds started scattering out of their way.

  Something in their demeanor or their faces warned the people around them that trouble wasn’t going to be tolerated.

  That, or most of them had seen the news broadcast, he supposed. An “armed and dangerous” official status did tend to open up a pathway, after all.

  Either way, someone called the cops. Security aboard a space station didn’t have much more access to vehicles or other mobility enhancers than anyone else, so there were no sirens and minimal shouting.

  David and his people had just rounded a corner at the edge of the shuttle docking area when they found their way barred by a dozen determined-looking men and women in light body armor. They were carrying the same stunguns he and his people were wielding and had set up a barricade across the corridor.

  It was good work for short notice, he reflected as he paused in the crosshairs of a dozen weapons.

  “Captain David Rice, you are under arrest,” the lead officer declared. “Throw down your weapons and submi—”

  For a horrible moment, David thought that
Binici had completely ignored his instructions not to kill the police and thrown a grenade. Then the flashbang went off and he wasn’t thinking much of anything. Without the shielding and ear protection built into the suit hood he was no longer wearing, he was even less protected from the light and noise than the cops were.

  By the time he blinked the spots away from his eyes and regained some awareness, he realized he’d been flung against one wall by the Marines—and the cops were collapsed backward from their barricade.

  “Some warning?” he said bitterly to Kavanagh as the Marine helped him up.

  “There wasn’t time,” Binici replied as she rejoined them. “They’ll live. SmartDarts and Nix solutions.”

  “Nix” solutions were neutralization compounds, carefully calibrated knockout gases. Less capable of adjusting their efficacy to their target than SmartDarts, they still shouldn’t have seriously injured anyone healthy enough to be a serving police officer.

  David hoped.

  “Come on,” Binici continued. “The shuttle is still five minutes away, and if there were cops to blockade us…”

  “There’s cops at the shuttle,” David concluded, shaking aside his distaste for injuring cops just doing their jobs. “We’ll deal with that when we get there.”

  “Then let’s get there.”

  Stunguns fired their rounds at a far lower velocity than regular firearms—otherwise, the SmartDarts would be just as lethal as regular bullets—which resulted in a very distinct soft coughing sound when they were fired.

  That sound was echoing repeatedly down the corridors as David and his Marines rushed toward the shuttle. With everything going to hell, he considered stopping to assess the situation for only about five seconds…and then decided to fall back on the age-old standby of Navy officers and soldiers all over.

  He charged to the sound of the guns.

  His three Marines followed him and they burst out into the open bay connecting to the shuttle airlocks. While the Java police were lacking the heavy armor of their true riot squads, they had brought up riot shields and mobile barricades that were allowing them to cross the bay despite the hail of fire Mike Kelzin and the Marines with him were laying down.

  It was as genteel as a firefight could get, with both sides sticking to the nonlethal SmartDarts, trying to avoid fatalities despite entirely contradictory objectives. David knew Kelzin wouldn’t hold back for long, especially as the cops’ shields prevented the SmartDarts striking home.

  Unfortunately for the locals, David and his people were on the wrong side of the mobile barricades, and they opened fire into the rear of the police assault. Stunguns weren’t particularly rapid-firing weapons—but they were fast enough.

  Half of the cops went down in convulsing heaps before they even realized someone was behind them, and the rest found themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. Kavanagh took a SmartDart and went down, David took a partial shock from a near-miss…and then it was over.

  David levered the still-twitching Marine up onto his shoulder and hauled him across the bay as the defending Marines spread out to cover them. SmartDarts didn’t take someone out for very long, seconds to minutes at most.

  If any of the cops regained enough control to be able to act before David made it onto the shuttle, they decided discretion was the better part of valor.

  “Kelzin, please tell me we’re moving,” David barked as the Marines closed the airlock behind him. “The locals are going to be very grumpy.”

  “Yeah, they locked us down an hour ago,” the pilot replied. “Refused to unhook the umbilicals; even turned out to have big, heavy clamps to hold us in place.”

  David winced.

  “Please tell me you dealt with those,” he said.

  “Not yet,” Kelzin told him, grinning as his Captain entered the cockpit. The pilot was running some kind of code sequence on his panels, adjusting it every few seconds, and then…David felt the clamps give way.

  “On the other hand, Kelly left us some prepared code for just this kind of incident,” the pilot continued. “Clamps are free and the umbilicals are their problem. Sit down and strap in.”

  David barely made it into the chair before Kelzin hit the throttle, opening up the shuttle’s main engines and tearing them away from the station. It was a violation of about sixty safety protocols and most likely welded several of the shuttle airlocks shut behind them, even as Kelzin was clearly making sure he didn’t hit any surface with enough heat to burn through and, say, crisp a bunch of stunned cops.

  Somehow, David didn’t care much about infrastructure damage.

  “Take us out after Falcon,” he ordered. “No turnover; just burn for the outer system. Kelly will be able to catch us.”

  The shuttle could pull five, maybe six gravities without injuring its passengers. Red Falcon, with gravity runes throughout the ship, could pull ten. She could catch them and jump out.

  The problem was going to be if someone intercepted them along the way.

  “Yeah, they are not happy with us,” Kelzin quipped, and David shook his head.

  Four corvettes were now vectoring toward their shuttle. None of them were particularly close, but they all had the angle advantage on the course they had to take to meet with Red Falcon.

  “Anyone launching missiles yet?” the Captain asked. Five gravities of acceleration were enough to push him back into his seat hard, but the controls were designed for that.

  The shuttle had a few toys it wasn’t supposed to, but he doubted they were enough to stand off the salvos of four warships, even sublight pocket warships.

  “Not yet,” the pilot replied. “On the other hand, they’re not hailing us, either. I suppose they might not be guessing that Falcon has ten gravities of acceleration, in which case we would need to slow down to match velocities with her.”

  “Or they’re just planning on saving ammunition and shooting us with lasers,” David said grimly. “How confident are you feeling, Mike?”

  “I don’t plan on dying in this shithole system less than a week after I got married,” Kelzin replied. “Those corvettes might be able to kill us, but they sure as hell aren’t going to catch me.”

  “I don’t suppose we have a plan for that?”

  Kelzin chuckled.

  “I’m going with ‘don’t get hit,’” he admitted. “I’m open to other suggestions. You’ve got the dirty-tricks panel, boss.”

  David nodded and started running through the tools available to him. They were about what he figured. They didn’t have anything resembling an active defense, just jammers and decoys that were pointless to launch until their pursuers had fired.

  “Any word from Falcon?” he asked.

  “Kelly confirmed our course,” the pilot replied. “Still a bit before they need to start accelerating. It’s going to be a near-run thing, boss.”

  “It always is,” David said, engaging presets throughout the system. He’d probably have a lot of warning of incoming fire, but it didn’t hurt to be ready to deal with whatever they threw at him.

  “And there it goes,” Kelzin suddenly said, flagging icons on the screen. “One missile from the closest corvette. Fusion drive, four thousand gravities. That’s a hell of a missile, but it’s got to be a warning shot.”

  “Let’s not take that as a given,” the Captain replied. “This is just a civilian shuttle, so far as they know. That missile out-accelerates us almost a thousand to one.”

  “You can deal with it, right?”

  “Probably,” David confirmed as the shuttle’s passive sensors sucked in all of the data they could. “I’m not even sure how many launchers those corvettes have, though. We can deal with one, maybe two, missiles at a time.

  “I’m guessing four corvettes can fire off more than…what the fuck?!”

  Red Falcon was moving. Her antimatter engines were flaring to life at full power, flinging her toward the shuttle at a combined fifteen gravities—and new icons sparked on the screens as her launchers engage
d. Antimatter-drive signatures flared brightly enough to be seen across the star system.

  “I make it six missiles,” Kelzin replied, his voice distracted. “They’re not sticking to a single salvo…what are they doing?”

  “Warning shots,” David concluded as the vectors traced themselves in on the screen. “They’re warning the locals off.”

  Two of the missiles came screaming in at the weapon the locals had fired at Kelzin’s shuttles. The Phoenix antimatter-drive missiles weren’t designed to be counter-missiles, but they were almost three times as maneuverable. The fusion-drive missile died easily.

  The other four missiles flashed toward the local corvettes. The tiny ships hadn’t been prepared to be fired upon, and their ECM and jammers were offline. Their RFLAM turrets came on late and slow, though David judged that they’d probably intercept the incoming fire.

  They didn’t get a chance. At a hundred thousand kilometers of distance, each antimatter missile detonated.

  Red Falcon’s message was very clear: do not fuck with our Captain.

  For a few seconds, David wasn’t sure if the locals were going to call his people’s bluff. It would have been a bad idea—Falcon could definitely obliterate the corvettes and probably take on the guardships as well.

  Then the corvettes broke off. They could still range on the shuttle, but accelerating away from it was the clearest sign they could give.

  Message sent, received, and acknowledged—and all without a single radio transmission.

  48

  Kelly knew perfectly well that she wasn’t the best pilot aboard the ship—that honor went to her husband—but she was one of the handful qualified to fly Red Falcon herself. She’d barely scraped a pity pass on the hands-on flying component of her merchant officer’s exam the other year.