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

by Glynn Stewart

  That had been then and this was now. She’d been aware of her shortcomings and worked on them, hard, with David Rice’s expert guidance.

  Now she maneuvered the multi-megaton freighter through space with the skill of a seasoned veteran, matching velocity and acceleration with the fleeing shuttle perfectly and then nudging them together. Scooping up the shuttle without either vehicle even reducing acceleration was a complicated task, a carefully calculated swoop.

  She nailed it perfectly and Kelzin handled his part just as well. The shuttle bay swooped around the fleeing shuttle, and Kelzin shut off his engines in almost the exact same moment.

  Kelly exhaled a long sigh as she double- and triple-checked the cameras from the shuttle bay. The small craft seemed to hang for a moment, and then her husband gently brought it in to touch down on the floor.

  “Mage Soprano, we’ve got the Captain,” she said into the link to the simulacrum chamber. “I make it thirty-five minutes to space clear enough to jump. You?”

  “Much the same,” the Ship’s Mage agreed. “Any problems on the screens?”

  Kelly studied the sensor feeds. Four of the Java Self Defense Force’s big guardships were now moving toward Red Falcon, but their courses were quite specific.

  “We’re being herded out-system, but the locals don’t want to actually get in a fight,” she concluded aloud. “They’re in our missile range, but I don’t think we even need warning shots. Everyone knows what’s going on.”

  She was half-expecting a lecture from Captain Rice when he made it to the bridge. Using antimatter missiles to intimidate the locals risked their cover. On the other hand, the locals might well have thought it was a bluff—it was possible, after all, that they’d acquired a small number of the missiles and were using them to test the locals’ nerve.

  If the JSDF had thought she was bluffing, they had decided not to call it…which was good for everyone. Kelly LaMonte didn’t want to kill the local security people.

  But if it was a choice between that and getting her own people out, well, she’d deal with her conscience later.

  “Jumping now,” Soprano’s voice echoed onto the bridge, moments before David Rice strode in.

  “Captain!” Kelly rose from the command chair and saluted crisply.

  “XO. Well done,” he told her as he stepped up to the chair, looking more than a little shell-shocked. “We’re in deeper shit than we hoped, but we pulled everyone out we could.”

  Kelly winced.

  “‘We could,’ boss?” she echoed back to him. “We didn’t get much of an update.”

  “Rhianna, Victor, and Conroy didn’t make it,” he said quietly. “The Augments that captured me killed them. Our lead is dead, and…we have no proof the Augments were LMID. Everything we’ve done was a waste of our goddamn time.”

  He turned to the channel to the simulacrum chamber.

  “Maria, keep us jumping,” he ordered. “How many random jumps can you put us through?”

  “Four,” Soprano replied with a dry “we all know you know the answer to this question” tone. “Then we’re stuck wherever we end up for six hours.”

  “Do it,” Rice ordered before turning back to Kelly. “Our cover is fucked,” he said bluntly. “We may not be able to prove that the two Augments who were cleaning up the loose ends from Ardennes were LMID, but they definitely were reporting home. Whoever is behind this, whether it’s Legatus or some third party we don’t know about with almost-identical resources, knows who we are now.”

  “What do we do?” Kelly asked.

  “We get clear of Java.”

  Another twisting distortion rippled through the ship as the Mages teleported her again.

  “Then we go home,” the Captain finished after coughing against the discomfort. “Back to Tau Ceti to report in. In terms of digging into this shadow war, Red Falcon just became less of an asset, so we’ll see what our superiors think.”

  Kelly nodded.

  “Is Mike okay?” she asked softly as another jump rippled through the ship.

  “Everyone’s fine,” Rice told her. “Everyone who lived, anyway.” He shook his head. “I don’t think the locals will be able to ID our lost Marines. On the one hand, that means they won’t try and hold the Augments’ murders against Mars…but on the other, it means we won’t be able to get their bodies home to their families.”

  “Damn.” Kelly wasn’t even sure how to respond. The Captain seemed to blame himself, but it felt like the enemy had been one step ahead of them the whole way. “Isn’t…Gods, isn’t the fact that Augments kidnapped you and seem to be working for whoever’s arming the rebels proof enough?”

  “Legatus isn’t the only system that produces military cyborgs,” Rice replied. “And even if we could prove that our attackers were Legatan cyborgs, that doesn’t mean they were an officially sanctioned operation or were even Legatan citizens anymore.”

  He shook his head.

  “It goes on the mountain of circumstantial evidence that leads MISS to be deathly certain who our enemy is…but it isn’t the ironclad proof we were after. We needed Antoni for that, if she was the one working directly with them.”

  “So… what do we do?” she asked again, as the fourth and final—for now—jump tore through the ship, leaving Red Falcon most of four light-years away from Java in a completely random set of directions.

  “Like I said, we go home,” Rice repeated. “Our work here is done. Others may be able to follow up on what we discovered, but I think this whole mess is a dead end.”

  He smiled sadly.

  “As for right now, I have the con. You go check in on your spouses. Mike may be fine, but he did get shot at and that isn’t really part of his job description.”

  “He’s fine,” Kelly told her boss. “But I need to see that.”

  “I know,” Rice agreed. “Go!”

  Kelly considered where everyone would be and headed toward the simulacrum chamber instead of their quarters. She guessed correctly and found both of her spouses about halfway back to the hab ring. Xi Wu was, as usual, utterly shattered from the jump.

  Mike was supporting their wife, but he didn’t look entirely present himself. Kelly shook her head and then wrapped both of them in her arms.

  “You both look like shit,” she told them conversationally. “Neither of you is going anywhere except to bed.”

  “Is that a promise or a demand?” Mike asked, but his voice was tired. “Sorry, long day.”

  “Yeah, we generally prefer that nobody gets shot at,” Xi said, her own voice drained. “Especially not our husband.”

  Kelly took over from Mike, draping Xi’s arm around her own shoulder as she pulled both of them forward.

  “We’ll be fine,” she told them. “We’re a long way from anywhere now, and no one can follow us through four random jumps. We didn’t even file a course before we ran, so they have no idea where we are.”

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned on this ship, it’s never say never,” Mike said grimly. “Bed sounds good. I might even be tired enough to keep my hands to myself.”

  “Drat,” Xi complained, but there was no energy behind it. Kelly was by far the most awake of the trio.

  “You two,” she told them with a smile. “I love you both. Don’t overdo it.”

  She’d watched enough shuttles blowing apart with friends aboard and Mages burning out their brains overusing magic for one lifetime. Friends were bad enough.

  “We’ll be safe,” she reiterated. “And if someone pulls off a miracle and finds us anyway, I’ll keep us safe. No matter what.”

  “I know,” Xi murmured, leaning her head against Kelly’s shoulder. “We both know, my love. I’ll make sure he sleeps.”

  They reached the door to their quarters, and Mike took their Mage lover from Kelly again.

  “And I’ll make sure she sleeps while you keep watch over us,” he told her. “We’re going to be okay, all of us. It’s just been a long day.”

 
Her spouses entered their quarters, and Kelly was about to follow when her wrist-comp buzzed gently. She glanced after her lovers, then softly closed the door before checking the device.

  Somehow, she was damn sure her day had just grown a lot longer.

  49

  “Once, just once, I’d like to face an enemy who plays by the normal fucking rules.”

  Jeeves’s curse echoed across Red Falcon’s bridge as the jump flare began to dissipate into the background of deep space.

  “We’re playing with the best,” David replied grimly, regretfully sending an alert to Kelly’s wrist-comp. “So, they don’t necessarily play by the rules of the rest. What have we got?”

  “Breaking it down,” Jeeves replied, the tactical officer running through his data. He sighed. “Well, at least I know how they found us.”

  “Beyond a Tracker?” David asked.

  An icon on the screen flashed red.

  “That’s the same ostentatious gold jump-yacht that was at Java. Tracker has to be aboard her, and she had friends waiting in hiding to come meet her. Big friends.” Jeeves sighed. “Familiar friends.”

  The new icons began to propagate and David recognized the iconography.

  “Monitors,” he concluded. “The Bears?”

  “And apparently, the good Admiral Commanding replaced his losses from the last time he tangled with us,” Jeeves agreed. “I’ve got eight of his seven-hundred-thousand-ton pocket destroyers closing on us. Fucked if I know where they came from, though.”

  “They were waiting in hiding somewhere near the system, and they sent a second ship to retrieve them,” David concluded. “They have to have at least four Mages per ship, maybe even five to make it here with sequential jumps.”

  Their Tracker was also better than the ones who’d been chasing him before. Those had needed an hour or two to resolve a jump direction. This one had apparently pulled it off fast enough that he’d barely been out here for an hour.

  Which meant he was five hours from being able to jump.

  “How far are they from missile range?” he asked quietly.

  “We’re both effectively at rest,” Jeeves replied. “Our new Phoenix VIIIs outrange the VIs they had last time, but the less flight time we give them to dial in our birds, the better.”

  The monitors’ engines lit up at twelve gravities, lunging toward Red Falcon in a maneuver that left no doubt to their intentions.

  “They’re just over thirty-five light-seconds away and burning at full accel,” the gunner concluded. “Forty-five minutes to range if they’re carrying Phoenix VIs.”

  “Enough time for everyone to be ready for what’s coming,” David agreed. “Not enough time for us to jump away. This is going to suck, Jeeves.”

  “I know.” The gunner shook his head. “There’s no way he’ll fall for our old tricks, either.”

  Last time, the Bears had been using standard Phoenix VIs with militia-grade sensors and targeting software. They’d collided with the MISS databases aboard Red Falcon and been shredded.

  The Bears had come off much worse that time, though, and had agreed to sell out their Legacy employers in exchange for money and their lives. They’d been supposed to keep their noses clean, too.

  “Let’s get a com channel,” David ordered. “I doubt chatting is going to get us anywhere useful, but Aristos made promises he doesn’t look like he’s keeping. Let’s see what he has to say for himself.”

  David turned on his recorders and faced them with a calm smile.

  “Golden Bears. I’m guessing from the sheer number of you that Jason Aristos is here, and I seem to recall some degree of him promising to behave himself.

  “Your presence here suggests that you’re doing something very different, and I feel I must remind the Admiral Commanding that I still hold more than enough evidence to destroy his mercenary license.

  “I don’t think any of us want a fight here, so I suggest we keep the range open and leave each other be.”

  He waited. There was over a minute of time lapse in the communications loop right now, but he had time to play with. The mercenaries were already in his range, but they wouldn’t be in their range of him for at least forty minutes still.

  The response arrived in several minutes and it began as David expected. The video was focused on Aristos, a tall, thickly built man with tanned skin and pitch-black hair that hung to his shoulders, lounging in a command chair and smirking.

  “Captain David Rice, I really did plan on keeping my nose clean,” he said brightly. “I hate to seek out trouble I’m not being paid for after all. But, well, I lucked into a contract that really didn’t need me to do more than hang out and be backup for a couple of guys doing a hard job.”

  His smirk left David in very little doubt as to which two guys he was talking about. The Golden Bears had been backing up the Augments killing their way through David’s loose ends since the beginning. They’d even been at Darius…and he wondered now if that had been a coincidence after all.

  If the Bears’ passengers had been hunting Seule, following the chain all the way back from Ardennes, then they had been seeking the same man for the same reason.

  “When you showed up at Darius, I wondered,” Aristos noted. “But Bear was sure you were his ally, not his foe. Given that Bear is now dead, it seems he was wrong. On the other hand, that error works to my advantage.”

  There was an edge to the Admiral Commanding’s smirk now. Bear, at a guess, was the Augment David’s people had left dead in a rental apartment in Java.

  “You killed a lot of my people and shattered our reputation. Our new contract let us rebuild, but I do not forget my dead, Captain Rice…but I couldn’t afford to fight you. Not then.

  “Now, happily, my new employer wants you dead and they’ve put quite a large sum of money on that idea,” Aristos concluded. “There’s no games, no bets, no compromises this time, Captain Rice. I know how many Mages you have. You can’t jump, you can’t run…and I have twice as many ships this time.

  “I’m going to kill you, David Rice. And there is nothing you can do about it.”

  David swallowed hard as the message ended, and checked the scanners. The approaching fleet was still well over thirty minutes from range, and he traded gazes with Jeeves as LaMonte finally rejoined them.

  “I was listening on my wrist-comp,” she said softly. “What do we do?”

  “He’s right. We can’t run,” David told them. “We can turn, keep the range open, and hammer him with missiles. That’s all I can think of.”

  “That buys us over an hour,” LaMonte pointed out. “It’s not nothing—we can empty our magazines of the Phoenix VIIIs and reload in that time.”

  “Get on nav,” David ordered, his fingers dancing across his console. “Jeeves? Let’s send the bastard the only response he’s going to pay any attention to. Did we identify which ship was his?”

  “No. Transmission was bounced from all nine.”

  “All right.” David considered the screen for several long seconds, then tapped the second ship from the front. “Designate them Bandits One through Nine based on distance for the monitors. The yacht is nine. We may try and take her intact; we’ll see how this goes.

  “Otherwise, target Bandit Two and open fire. Maximum rate of fire, maximum velocity. Let’s kill the—”

  “Incoming fire!” LaMonte barked as she dropped into her console. “That son of a bitch—I’m reading twelve thousand gravities.”

  David winced. Those weren’t Phoenix VIs. They were Phoenix VIIs, and that extra acceleration meant that the range he’d been hoping to maintain was already gone.

  “See what games you can play, Kelly,” he ordered. “Hold back nothing. Our enemies already know we’re MISS. Let’s show the damn Admiral Commanding just what that means.”

  As he spoke, Red Falcon shivered as her own launchers spoke again. The incoming missiles were inbound at twelve thousand gravities. His own missiles were five hundred gravities faster and woul
d hit first.

  “We can’t run, not and keep the RFLAMs lined up,” he continued. Almost all of his ship’s weapons faced forward. For a long-range missile duel where he was outside his enemy’s range, that didn’t matter. If he was facing incoming fire, however, he needed his defenses pointed toward the enemy.

  “I’ll use the hull thrusters to push us back, keep the range a bit more open,” he said aloud. “We can only pull about three gravities with those, so this is going to hurt.”

  “We have at least four hours until any of the Mages can jump,” LaMonte murmured.

  “I know,” he confirmed. “So, let’s kill these sons of bitches to keep everyone safe, shall we?”

  Red Falcon’s missiles had launched a few seconds later than the Bears’ weapons, but they accelerated much faster and arrived first. They also came crashing in at a much higher velocity, had more powerful electronic warfare systems, and were running custom code written by James Kellers and Kelly LaMonte.

  They were probably only a bit deadlier than their sisters in the Navy’s arsenals. The specialist MISS code the two engineers had access to was only mildly superior than that available to the Navy.

  Compared to the older missiles the Bears had they were probably at least twice as dangerous—and they needed every edge as ten missiles charged into the teeth of a hundred and twenty RFLAM turrets.

  The enemy’s defensive lasers were drawn in on David’s displays as innocent orange lines. The time delay meant that everything he saw was already thirty seconds old by the time it reached him. The lasers were old. The explosions were old.

  None of their first salvo made it through, but antimatter missiles also had the side effect of lashing the entire area they detonated in with devastating waves of radiation. The hash made it harder to target the ships behind it—but it also made it harder for those ships to hit the incoming missiles.

  Follow-up salvos of antimatter missiles grew more dangerous in a way no other weapon in David’s experience matched.