14
The news reports playing quietly in the background as Roslyn set to work in the hotel room were depressing. No one had been injured, but the lack of information about the explosion was leading to all kinds of ugly speculation.
She’d heard the news anchors blame everyone from Song of the Huntress’s crew to rogue Republic remnants to Mage-funded terrorists. The Republic-remnants theory was probably the closest, but the reporters weren’t going to find evidence of anyone.
“I suppose if there were a smoking gun in these ownership docs, MISS would have found it ages ago,” Knight opined drily. The Marine Corporal was suffering from the benefits of her skillset: while Roslyn could do the necessary analysis, she couldn’t hack databases.
Knight could, though her cyberwarfare skills were usually more tactical.
“Well, I’ve pulled one thing out of it that MISS either didn’t notice or didn’t make it into the reports,” Roslyn replied. “Take a look.”
She expanded her holographic display and gestured Mooren and Knight over to her. “A few of the investments MISS managed to ID as belonging to Finley were run through numbered companies with this woman as a partner.”
Roslyn highlighted the name: Roxana Lafrenz.
“MISS flagged Lafrenz as a potential interest, but they either didn’t run the name against the list of known Prometheus Mages or my copy of the Red List is more complete than the one they sent to their field agents,” she noted. The latter was entirely possible.
She was learning that the Red List was more segmented than the Protectorate liked to pretend. Any name on the Red List was dead-or-alive, no escapes permitted.
“Sir?” Mooren questioned, looking at the name.
The Navy Mage brought up a profile next to the list of ownership documents. A rotating holographic headshot of a blonde woman attached to a career record.
“Mage Ulla Roxana Lafrenz,” Roslyn identified the headshot. “Mars-born Mage by Blood. Graduated from Curiosity City University’s thaumaturgy program with a focus on biomagic. Proceeded to acquire a medical doctorate and become a Mage-Surgeon.”
She grimaced as the two Marines reached the next part of Lafrenz’s bio.
“At the age of thirty-two, she was identified as a member of the White Star Mage supremacy organization,” Roslyn continued. “Accused of no less than six murders, she fled Mars less than six hours ahead of a warrant for her arrest and disappeared.
“Later intelligence showed that she appeared in the Republic as a protégée of Samuel Finley eight years ago,” she concluded. “On the other hand, she vanished again from even most Republic records four years ago—around when her name started showing up in the local corporate ownership documents.”
“We might just have our lab head?” Mooren asked.
“We might. At the very least, we have a senior Prometheus Mage, a Mage-Surgeon heavily involved in the development of the original brain-extraction technology, who appears to be on this planet,” Roslyn told her subordinate. “If all we do here, Sergeant, is find Lafrenz, we will have made our efforts more than worth it.”
She gestured at the pages of ownership listings they were looking at. Corporate ownership was a matter of public record in most human space, if not necessarily easy to access—or useful, unless you knew exactly what you were looking for.
“It also gives us a second name to look for in this damn haystack,” she told the other two. Most of the Marines were just holding up walls at this point, but Knight and Mooren were helping.
Herbert had helped, but the pilot was now back at the shuttle making sure their gear was still where it was supposed to be.
“Somewhere in all of this is a pattern that explains why the man behind Project Prometheus bought up half a billion Republic pounds reliant worth of stock on the most isolated planet in the Republic of Faith and Reason.”
Roslyn shook her head
“I’m not seeing it yet,” she admitted. “But it has to be here.”
Whatever pattern was hidden in the data didn’t reveal itself after a single day of three analysts poring through it. Roslyn was able to pull out several more names of people who were involved in large percentages of the businesses and even numbered companies, but none of those appeared to lead anywhere.
She had three names of people who were definitely not in the Sorprendidas System—in one case because he’d been publicly tried and shot on Chrysanthemum during the slow dissolution of the Republic’s government.
Two more names—a pair of sisters, she guessed—didn’t seem to exist. At all.
One was a construction magnate with her fingers in practically every pie in Nueva Portugal. The woman wasn’t necessarily untouchable—Roslyn had a Warrant of the Mage-Queen’s Voice, after all—but she wasn’t going to be the first place the Mage-Lieutenant Commander started hunting.
People who owned provincial governors were generally difficult to interrogate.
As night fell over Nueva Portugal, Roslyn was starting to think that Ms. London O’Berne was their best option. If nothing else, if O’Berne was innocent, she could provide them with a lot of internal documents from the companies in question. Documents that might just give them answers MISS hadn’t been able to access.
“I do wish we had the work the MISS agents did,” Mooren said grimly. “This is enough outside my area that I’m worried about missing things, but even if we’re doing it right, we’re duplicating work they already did.”
“I know,” Roslyn agreed. “But we have to do it anyway. None of the reports I had gave us a smoking gun and Killough’s apartment was a public and wasteful bust.”
The Marine grunted.
“So, what do we do?”
“We take a break,” Roslyn decided. “Take Knight and half the team and go find a meal somewhere. I’ll keep the other half here for security until you get back, then do the same.”
She shook her head.
“There’s no point in burning ourselves dry. We’ve been on-planet for a day.”
“And we already blew up a bomb in the sky above the city,” Mooren replied. “Aren’t we making an impression.”
With the Marines providing security or gone, Roslyn was alone in the hotel room. She was still staring at the data, trying to see if she could divine which of the several hundred construction projects Finley’s people had been involved in had concealed a secret lab.
Nothing in the data was leaping out and providing exact information, and she sighed, pouring herself a glass of water as she looked at a holographic map of the city. If she had a battalion of Marines, she could send them off to inspect every site. With a squad, that wasn’t happening.
There was everything from parks to office towers to entire residential suburbs on the list. Finley and Lafrenz had run everything through numbered companies, but the MISS agents had cracked open the ownership on those.
Without that starting point, Roslyn figured she’d have been completely lost, public corporate documents be damned. With it, she was merely convinced she was looking at a massive amount of data that had to have an answer buried in it somewhere.
Enough of an answer, at least, to have justified killing four Martian agents.
She sipped her water and was considering calling the hotel desk to have something stronger sent up when her wrist-comp buzzed.
The icon was from Huntress’s general communications department, which seemed…odd.
“Mage-Lieutenant Commander Chambers,” she answered it crisply, allowing the device to scan her face for a holographic video call. An image of Lieutenant Commander Frost appeared in front of her, the blond officer looking amused.
“Commander,” he greeted her with a lazy attempt at the salute her Medal of Valor demanded. “How’s the surface?”
“Warm and cozy,” Roslyn replied carefully. She couldn’t speak about her mission or her frustrations. “What’s going on, Frost?”
“I have a message that came in without any headers or directional information
,” Frost told her, his tone slightly more serious and surprisingly soft. “I managed to keep it under wraps on our end, as I suspect it’s related to your mission—and all I know about your mission is ‘it’s classified.’”
He echoed Mage-Captain Daalman’s tones perfectly.
“The message’s header was simply: to the idiot that nearly blew up Nueva Portugal.”
Roslyn winced.
“While I hesitate to remotely support their description of today’s events,” Frost continued primly, “you are the only RMN officer in Nueva Portugal and, well, a bomb was teleported into the air.”
“Your point, Commander Frost?” Roslyn asked.
“I’m presuming the message is for you,” he told her. “Like I said, I kept it under wraps. Only myself and one of my Chiefs know about it, though I’ll have to brief the Captain.”
He grinned.
“Coms officers are used to seeing mail we’re not supposed to read, Chambers,” he said. “I haven’t decrypted the message, but I have identified the cipher. It’s an MISS code, our systems say, for covert operations.
“I’ll send the decryption protocol along with the message.” He shrugged. “If it isn’t for you, let me know and I’ll pass it on to the Captain. Seems the best compromise, yes?”
“It does,” Roslyn agreed, shaking her head at the man’s amusedly sardonic—but competent and sensible—approach to the odd message. “Thank you, Frost. I appreciate the care you’re taking.”
“You’re welcome, Chambers. Forwarding now. Good luck.”
The channel cut out, and her wrist-comp confirmed it had received an additional data transfer.
Opening the message and running it through the decryption that Frost had sent was the work of moments. The pure text message that followed was straightforward enough.
Please stop flailing around in the dark. Meet me.
That was followed by an address—a coffee shop twelve blocks from the apartment they’d visited—and a time. Eight AM local time the next day.
Roslyn shook her head. There was nothing to go on to make this sound legit or not—except that the code the message had been sent in was exactly what Ignác Frost had labeled it: an MISS deep-cover operative’s encryption.
The encryption was both the only proof that the message was from an ally—and all the proof Roslyn Chambers needed.
Plus, well, even if it was a trap, that was still a lead.
15
“We have eyes on the café,” Mooren’s voice said in Roslyn’s earpiece. “Two hundred, three hundred and five hundred meters.
“Backup team is just around the corner with Corporal Knight. Exo-team is in the shuttle with Lieutenant Herbert. Current response time estimate is eleven minutes.”
The Sergeant sounded disapproving to Roslyn.
“It takes five to warm the engines, Sergeant,” Roslyn reminded her. “And if we do that, we attract more attention from the locals than we want.”
She was walking down the street toward the café on her own. She was hardly defenseless, of course, and she knew that all three of Mooren’s surveillance/sniper teams had her in sight as well.
“Any sign of our contact?” she murmured, speaking almost subvocally to make sure none of the other people on the busy sidewalk heard her.
“The café is pretty busy,” the Marine told her. “I don’t see anyone who sticks out as a spy, though that’s what I’d expect. Any idea how you’re going to flag them?”
“None at all,” Roslyn admitted. “But they threw the invite my way, so I’m expecting them to have a plan.”
She and Mooren were both feeling the limitations of their manpower. The three sniper teams took up half of the Marines available to them—including the Staff Sergeant herself. Knight’s backup team was a single three-Marine fire team, including the Corporal. The team of Marines in exosuit combat armor aboard the shuttle was the last fire team they had.
Roslyn had seriously considered calling for more Marines, but that also felt like it would be overkill. Twelve Marines should be able to handle anything the secret lab’s protectors could throw at her—especially if Herbert dropped an exosuited fire team in.
“It’ll be fine, Sergeant,” she subvocalized, smiling at the young woman standing at the hostess’s lectern.
“Hi,” she greeted the youth. “I’m looking to meet someone here? Eight AM reservation.”
“Of course, ma’am,” the hostess said, taking a quick look back through her patrons. “Table six, I think—that gentleman?”
Roslyn didn’t recognize the slim dark-haired man in the blue suit, but she didn’t have much else to go on.
“I believe so. Thank you.”
She nodded to the hostess and headed into the open-air patio. The blue-suited man looked up at her approach and smiled. He looked gaunt compared to the imagery she had of him, as if he hadn’t eaten properly in weeks, but he was definitely the man she was looking for.
“I wondered,” he admitted. “Mage-Commander Chambers, I believe?”
“Mage-Lieutenant Commander,” she corrected. “And you are?”
“Michael Hammond,” he told her. “Or, to certain people not on Sorprendidas, Angus Killough.”
“Ah,” Roslyn breathed as she took her seat. She looked around. “This is rather…open for serious discussion, isn’t it?”
“It is, I suppose,” Killough agreed. “But I figured you’d want to have snipers on those rooftops in case I wasn’t what you hoped.” He waved airily at the buildings down the street—the buildings, Roslyn knew, where Mooren had placed snipers.
“And are you what I hoped?” Roslyn murmured.
“Well, you were in my apartment yesterday, looking for something,” he told her. “I haven’t been back there in a bit, as you clearly saw. Things got…hot. Communication channels were compromised.”
She raised an eyebrow at that, and he shrugged.
“A bit too public for details,” he conceded, “but there were some back doors we missed. Once I have secure coms, we’ll need to address that.”
“I’ll admit, I didn’t expect to meet you,” Roslyn murmured. “Your message was promising, but…we had every reason to believe you’d joined your predecessors.”
She wasn’t even sure what the best way to talk around the situation was—but she was sure that the people at the table next to them could overhear them without difficulty.
Roslyn also hadn’t ordered anything, so she was surprised when a robot trundled up with two sets of coffee and waffles.
“I took the liberty of ordering for us both,” Killough told her. “Feel free to decline, Commander, but I have no more control of this restaurant than you do.”
“Less, I think,” Roslyn murmured. “Snipers.”
“Do not eat that,” Mooren’s voice snapped in her ear. “We did not have a chance to sweep the kitchens.”
Roslyn chuckled and leaned back.
“I am being advised not to touch the food,” she said. “So. What do you want, Mr. Killough?”
“I suppose asking just what you were thinking yesterday would be rude,” he said drily. “I can put together the logic chain, I suppose, but it very nearly got messy.”
“I’ll admit that I didn’t expect to find a bomb in the apartment of a man we thought was dead,” Roslyn said. “I think we handled it relatively well after that.”
“Fair,” he conceded. “It could have been much worse. I had a security setup in the hallway that they missed, so I knew they’d stripped and rigged the apartment. Safest thing to do was leave it the hell alone.
“I figured they’d eventually either remove it themselves or send in an anonymous tip,” he told her. “My plan was to send an anonymous tip before the landlord tried to take possession.”
“Could have been messy,” Roslyn agreed.
“Thankfully, I had a backup plan and options,” Killough told her. “They just didn’t extend to retaining most of my damn tools. Hence reaching out once I realized you wer
e poking at the same problem.”
“Lafrenz,” she noted.
“Among others, yes,” he agreed. “I see you have access to our reports and some data.”
She glanced around at the other patrons. They weren’t paying attention, but this conversation could still be dangerous for them to overhear.
“I think we need to move this somewhere quieter,” she told him. “Just realize our observers are coming with me.”
“Of course,” he allowed. “May I bring my coffee at least?”
“Sure,” she said.
“All right,” Mooren said in her ear, the Sergeant’s voice resigned. “We also have visibility on the park one block south of your location. Backup team can move with you covertly and I’ll only need to relocate one sniper team.”
“Walk with me, Mr. Killough?” Roslyn said, eyeing the sidewalk Mooren was suggesting. It would work.
By the time they reached the park, Knight and the other two plainclothes Marines had fallen in around them. The five of them entered the green space and found a modicum of privacy there.
“Talk, Mr. Killough,” Roslyn ordered. “You’re alive where three other people are dead, but you went dark six weeks ago and everyone thought you were dead.”
“It turns out that the Link is still compromised,” he reiterated. “I don’t know how, I don’t know where, I don’t even know how they picked our reports out of the traffic running through the civilian net to the Core.
“But they IDed us based on our reports and moved to neutralize us as quickly as they could.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how many Marines you brought, Commander Chambers, but I guarantee you that you have underestimated the threat level.
“My analysis suggests we’re looking at at least three Mages and somewhere in the region of twenty covert-operation Augments,” Killough laid out swiftly. “At least one Mage appears to be primarily security while the others engage in their research.”
“That’s a larger security force than I expected, yes,” Roslyn conceded. “How big is this lab?”
A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10) Page 7
