“We knew we wouldn’t be able to use her as a freighter, but our survey came out even worse than I was afraid of,” he said. “She isn’t flyable, Captain. She’s done. She gave you everything she had and she kept you alive, but at the only price she could pay.”
David nodded stonily. Red Falcon had served him well, but in the end, he supposed she was only a ship. It still felt inglorious.
“She gave us her all,” he agreed. In the end, only twenty-seven of the big ship’s four hundred crew had died in the fight. Others, like James Kellers, were still in critical care, but most of David’s people had come home.
“I don’t know if we’re giving you a new ship,” Burns admitted. “That’s between you and MISS. I can tell you that we can’t fix Red Falcon. Not even a little bit. I recommend she be evacuated—in an orderly fashion but evacuated nonetheless.
“Then we’ll take her to the Navy scrapyards. She deserves better,” he said sadly, “but at least she’s going to go into new warships and not just general scrap.”
“She deserves better,” David agreed. There wasn’t much else to say. His ship was a wreck. He could buy a new one now, but that left all kinds of questions as to what happened next. He still had Peregrine, too, he supposed.
“Much of what you did in command of her is classified,” Burns told him. “Given that you were supposed to be a regular shipper for most of that time, I find that fascinating…but I also understand that you did well by her. She fell protecting her crew and the Protectorate.
“Not much more for a warship to ask, is there?”
To call the strange freighter a warship was perhaps the greatest courtesy and honor the two men in that office could give.
The infirmary room was dimly lit as Maria stepped in after silence answered her gentle knock. Given James’s injuries, the dimness was probably unnecessary, but she understood. Her own burnout had thankfully been relatively easily treated. More had been required than just wiping the blood off her face, but she’d recovered by the time they got back to Tau Ceti.
James…James was the worst-wounded member of Red Falcon’s crew still alive.
“I can still hear, you know,” he noted aloud in the dim light. “And I apparently know your breathing, Maria, even if you don’t introduce yourself after knocking.”
“That’s fair,” she told him, and crossed to his bedside. His entire head was wrapped in bandages, concealing the injuries she knew were underneath it.
Even without the bandages and the dim lighting he wouldn’t have been able to see her. James had lost both of his eyes in Red Falcon’s Engineering.
He reached out, hesitantly, for her. She met him halfway, sliding her hand into his and squeezing gently.
“You big lug,” she said softly. “How are you holding up?”
“From what they tell me, you may want to reassess your plans,” he said quietly. “I’m on the list for cybernetic eyes; they just want the rest of the injuries to heal up a bit more first. A week or two, at most.”
“Then what’s the problem?” Maria asked. “You’ll see. What more do we need?”
James chuckled softly, then coughed.
“They can’t do much about the scarring, Maria,” he told her. “I’m…I’m going to be hideous, is my understanding.”
“I don’t fucking care,” she snapped. “Do you hear me on that, James Kellers? I. Do. Not. Care.”
“I don’t want you to stay with me out of pity,” he replied, his hand starting to slide away.
She grabbed his hand before he could move it away, and pressed it to her lips.
“No,” she whispered. “Never. You run, I’ll chase you. You quit, I’ll support you. You stay with MISS or follow David or go buy your own damned ship, I’ll back you. It was never your face.”
“Ah. Fue que hablé español,” he noted with a somewhat forced chuckle.
“If you want to think that,” Maria replied. “I’m with you, James. Scars or no scars. Cyber-eyes or regrown. Whatever it takes, I’m with you to the end of the line.”
His grip on her hand was tight now, both of them clinging together as if the world would try to tear them apart.
“Be careful, you lug,” he said softly, throwing her own words back at her. “Or I might think you were saying you’d go wherever I do.”
“I am,” Maria Soprano said fiercely. “That is exactly what I’m saying.”
MISS had been kind enough to put an entire lodging facility at the disposal of David and his crew while they sorted out just what they were going to do with him. One of his conversations suggested that they might end up shipped down to one of the resorts on the surface if their limbo lasted much longer.
What none of his conversations had explained was why they were in limbo. He hadn’t decided what he was going to do yet, but at least part of that was that MISS hadn’t made any suggestions on their side. He was starting to look through ship-builder websites and assess his resources.
He couldn’t build a ship like Red Falcon, but he could pay to have a decently equipped—and armed—six- or eight-megaton ship built. If MISS didn’t get their act together, he could put in that order.
David was wavering back and forth over a message to one of the civilian shipbuilders, asking for a meeting to put together a proposal, when the door buzzer to his rented office went off.
“Come in,” he instructed.
The last person he expected to walk through the door was the tall, graying, and heavily built man who did. Even without the golden hand resting on his chest, there was no question that Hand Hans Lomond owned any room he happened to enter.
The Hand grabbed a spare chair and grinned at David as he took a seat, waiting for the Captain to get his thoughts sorted.
“Didn’t expect to see a Hand here, Lord Lomond,” he admitted.
“We try to keep our movements at least somewhat quiet,” Lomond replied. “In my case, I just got back from Condor. Interesting mess you found there, Captain. The team I left behind is going to be busy for weeks. Possibly months. The good Prince is going to be much poorer once we’re through with him.”
“And the mob?” David asked.
“Oh, we’re already done with them,” the Hand purred. “A lot of MISS people suddenly found themselves short a job, too. I’d have stayed longer, but the Mage-King called and a Hand answers.”
“What brings you here, then?” If the Mage-King had called one of his Hands in, they had more important places to be than David’s office.
“You,” Lomond said simply. “You deserve to know what you achieved, even if it’s all going to be dark and secret forever.”
“We achieved nothing,” David said bitterly. “No new evidence. No proof. Just a lot of dead people and my own ship wrecked.”
“That’s what it looks like, huh?” the Hand replied. “That’s probably a good thing in the end. Do you want to know what you did achieve?”
He stared at Lomond in silence, then made a “go ahead” gesture.
“You have to understand, Captain Rice, that the Protectorate is only granted a certain amount of money from the colonies under the Charter,” Lomond reminded him. “Technically, the Mage-King only commands the resources of the Sol System and a tiny stipend from each world.
“Funds beyond that have been negotiated with each system on a term basis, including those that fund the Royal Martian Navy. We can’t embark on a mass expansion of the Navy without all of the systems knowing.
“Including Legatus.”
David winced. He hadn’t thought through that component of the Protectorate’s funding. He hadn’t even really known it, not in detail.
“That’s why we needed proof,” he said. “Proof we didn’t get.”
“You didn’t get proof, no,” Lomond agreed. “Not proof we could drag into the Council of the Protectorate and throw at Legatus’s feet. Not proof that would enable us to take fleets and armies to Legatus and take down their government.
“But you got enough, Captain
Rice. An Augment assassin murdered their way across half the galaxy to cover up the Legatan arms supplied to Ardennes? That’s hard to brush away as a coincidence, even if it remains circumstantial. We can’t meet a legal standard of proof…but thanks to you, we can convince people.”
“Of what?” David asked.
“Project Weyland,” Lomond said simply. “Tau Ceti and five other Core Worlds are now directly underwriting a top secret expansion of the Royal Martian Navy. The money is coming entirely outside normal channels, so Legatus will never know it’s happening.
“Thanks to you, Captain Rice, when Legatus moves, we will be ready.”
“Doesn’t seem like enough,” David admitted with a sigh. “Not for the amount of blood that got shed.”
“It is enough,” the Hand told him. “You made a difference and we’re not done with you yet, not unless you want us to be.”
He gestured at the ship drawings on the wall screen.
“If you want to buy or build a civilian ship and go back to being a merchant, we won’t stop you. Hell, we’ll pay for the damn ship; we owe you that,” Lomond said. “But we can use you. Hell, I’m planning on poaching young Officer LaMonte regardless.”
“That woman will make a superb covert operator,” David told him.
“We agree. My next stop is to offer her a ship. Right now, however, I’m offering you one.”
“What kind of ship?” David asked. “My cover’s blown. Legatus knows who I work for.”
“So? Legatus is hardly our only enemy. In passing, Captain Rice, you allowed us to neutralize a major la Cosa Nostra transshipment center. In passing. You moved through the system and found our enemy.
“We want to give you a new ship. Less ostentatious than Red Falcon, but still a high-tier merchant ship. We’ll arm her with concealed weaponry and stick you with a new platoon of Marines. You’ll do what you did for us before, with a slight edge of staying away from Legatus.”
“And if I’m done?” David said softly.
“We’ll buy you a new ship anyway,” Lomond replied. “Pay you a pension, if you just want to retire on Amber. We can use you, Captain. We can always use agents like you, but Mars wants volunteers, not conscripts.”
David considered it for a moment. His own luck suggested that he’d end up right in the middle of the fight against the Protectorate’s underworld no matter what he did.
“All right,” he said slowly. “I guess I can stick myself back in uniform one more time.”
Lomond chuckled.
“You’re like me, Captain. You don’t have it in you to walk away. Neither do any of the young men and women you’ve trained. I haven’t met Montgomery yet, but I’ve spoken with my master about him. Officer LaMonte seems cut from the same cloth.
“You forge us agents of skill and integrity. Mars will always need men and women like you—and like your protégés.”
“You give me too much credit.”
“No. I don’t think so.”
Kelly stepped into the meeting room she’d been asked to attend with trepidation. Mysterious meeting invites were generally one of the more dangerous parts of being a spy, though she figured anyone who could get a meeting room in an MISS lodging and send her the invite through the MISS system was probably on her side.
Mike and Xi were both due in the same room in ten minutes, which left her both concerned and curious.
The heavily built older man sitting at the table wasn’t familiar to her, but she knew the golden hand he wore on a long chain around his neck.
“My Lord Hand,” she greeted him, suddenly unsure if she should bow or what. Her awkwardness must have shown, as he laughed and gestured her to a chair.
“I am Hand Hans Lomond,” he introduced himself. “Please, Officer LaMonte, sit.”
She sat and he gestured, conjuring a hologram of a ship above the table.
Kelly studied it with a practiced eye. There were enough details given to work out scale, at least. The ship was roughly the same size as the Golden Bears’ monitors, a hundred and fifty meter-long egg shape roughly thirty meters across.
Other than a vague hull resemblance, it was nothing like the monitors. She could pick out hatches for concealed weapons and shuttle bays, but the ship was trying to look like a half-megaton fast packet courier.
“What’s this?” she asked carefully.
“Rhapsody in Purple,” Lomond told her. “MISS covert operations ship KEX-26. She’s a commando insertion ship, a jump-ship that can pass for a fast courier but really isn’t designed to pretend to be anybody so much as to be invisible.”
“Invisibility in space is impossible,” Kelly objected.
“Magic can change that, but in the main, yes. Rhapsody in Purple and her sisters have a slew of new tech to help, but her main stealth is appearing to be something else at a distance. Her job will be to provide a level of black striking capability to the Protectorate that we’ve never truly had or needed before.”
Kelly blinked and continued studying the ship.
“She sounds classified as hell. Why are you showing her to me?” she asked.
“There are three Rhapsodies under construction,” Lomond told her. “Rhapsody in Purple will be the first to commission, in just over two months. We want you to command her.”
“Me?” Kelly half-squeaked. “I’m an XO, not…a…”
“Not a covert operations commander?” the Hand asked. “You’ve demonstrated the skills for the job and, well, frankly…no one else is qualified to command a Rhapsody either. We need to start somewhere, and you’re a better fit for the job than Captain Rice…Captain LaMonte.”
“I need…to think about this,” she admitted. She was tempted—Gods, was she tempted—but she couldn’t do anything without…
Without asking Xi and Mike.
“That’s why you have Xi and Mike coming as well, isn’t it?” she asked accusingly.
“Of course,” Lomond agreed cheerfully. “You’ll need a Ship’s Mage and some damn good pilots for the job we want you to do. I wouldn’t dream of taking you away from your spouses—and the three of you will make amazing agents of Mars.”
UnArcana Stars Coming December 11, 2018
Damien Montgomery returns December 11, 2018 in UnArcana Stars.
Find out more at UnArcana.com
About the Author
Glynn Stewart is the author of Starship’s Mage, a bestselling science fiction and fantasy series where faster-than-light travel is possible–but only because of magic. His other works include science fiction series Duchy of Terra, Castle Federation and Vigilante, as well as the urban fantasy series ONSET and Changeling Blood.
Writing managed to liberate Glynn from a bleak future as an accountant. With his personality and hope for a high-tech future intact, he lives in Kitchener, Ontario with his wife, their cats, and an unstoppable writing habit.
Other Books by Glynn Stewart
For release announcements join the mailing list or visit GlynnStewart.com
Starship’s Mage
Starship’s Mage
Hand of Mars
Voice of Mars
Alien Arcana
Judgment of Mars
UnArcana Stars (upcoming)
Starship’s Mage: Red Falcon
Interstellar Mage
Mage-Provocateur
Agents of Mars
Castle Federation
Space Carrier Avalon
Stellar Fox
Battle Group Avalon
Q-Ship Chameleon
Rimward Stars
Operation Medusa
Exile
Ashen Stars
Exile
Duchy of Terra
The Terran Privateer
Duchess of Terra
Terra and Imperium
Light of Terra: A Duchy of Terra series
Darkness Beyond (upcoming)
Vigilante (With Terry Mixon)
Heart of Vengeance
Oath of Vengeance
Bound By Stars: A Vigilante Series (With Terry Mixon)
Bound By Law
Bound by Honor (upcoming)
ONSET
ONSET: To Serve and Protect
ONSET: My Enemy’s Enemy
ONSET: Blood of the Innocent
ONSET: Stay of Execution
Changeling Blood
Changeling’s Fealty
Hunter’s Oath
Noble’s Honor (upcoming)
Fantasy Stand Alone Novels
Children of Prophecy
City in the Sky
Agents of Mars (Starship's Mage: Red Falcon Book 3) Page 33