by Terry Mixon
“The good news is that it looks like Earth is taking this all damn seriously,” Fields told Brad over the radio six hours later. The mercenary Commodore was watching with one eye as Suzuki’s shuttle made its way over to Oath of Vengeance, and listening to the Fleet Commodore.
“That sounds like it’s supposed to come with a side of ‘bad news’, Mark,” Brad told the older man. “What’s bad about Earth taking this seriously, beyond it being too late to make a difference?”
“Task Group Immortal just left orbit heading our way,” the Commodore said flatly. “There is no way—none at all—that they got a battleship moving in thirty-six hours without prior preparation. Let alone a battleship, three cruisers, twelve destroyers, and thirty frigates.”
Brad inhaled sharply.
Immortal. One of the Commonwealth Fleet’s three battleships. The newest of them, not that any of the battleships were particularly modern. At six times the size of even the brand-new Tremendous-class cruisers, they didn’t need to be. The sheer overwhelming firepower of their heavy fifteen-centimeter mass-driver turrets and torpedo batteries was more than enough—and that was ignoring the four eighty-centimeter super-heavy mass-driver turrets the ships carried.
But the battleships weren’t truly mobile ships. They were too big to accelerate at the rates of the smaller Fleet ships, burned too much fuel. You could make up the difference by accelerating a bit longer and get there at much the same time in the end, but it cost a lot of fuel to move a battleship.
None of them had moved in Brad’s entire adult life. And now one was heading to Ceres.
“Forty-six ships” was what he said aloud, however, summarizing Fields’s comment. “That’s definitely them taking the situation seriously, though I’m surprised they have that many ships to hand.”
Hopefully, his tone was enough of a warning to Fields. With everything going on, he no longer trusted the Fleet’s communications to be secure. Everdark, he barely trusted the Fleet anymore.
“Yeah,” Fields said slowly, the long-drawn-out word showing he’d caught what Brad hadn’t said. He shook his head, clearly thinking through something.
“We’ll need to get copies of all of your sensor records, and I owe you at least a partial payment for your service,” he continued, as if they hadn’t just decided that they couldn’t continue this conversation on a channel. “We owe you the price tag of two Warriors, and I’ll admit I simply don’t have that in my reserve, but I’ll see what I can do.
“Would you be available for me to come aboard Oath of Vengeance and trade data for cash in person?”
And have the conversation they couldn’t have over a radio channel.
“I am always at your disposal, Commodore,” Brad told him. “I have a meeting with Horatio’s commander, but I’ll be available after that. Say, sixteen hundred GMT?”
That would give Suzuki two hours to get through what he’d learned. Hopefully, that would be enough.
“That works,” Fields confirmed. “I’ll want to get your feeling on this whole battle as well, Commodore. Keep an hour or so free for me?”
“I’ll do what I can.”
Suzuki looked almost offensively rested and put-together. He saluted crisply as he entered the room with Brad and Michelle, then took a quick seat.
“Are you two all right?” he asked. “Everything I’ve seen says it was bad.”
“We’re fine,” Brad said shortly. “I’m not going to get used to losing friends, but I have the sick feeling it will happen again. Until and unless we put an end to the Everdarkened Cadre.
“What happened at Kobayashi, Captain? I thought I left you orders to stay in place.”
Suzuki snorted.
“That was my plan,” he agreed. “We had the situation under control and the prisoners contained when the Fleet just showed up out of the night, about twelve hours after the attack on Ceres.
“From what Commodore Boerefijn told me, they’d been on a dark patrol through the Belt and responded as soon as you sent your report to the Agency.” Suzuki grimaced. “I didn’t get the impression that Boerefijn was entirely enthused with having his command coopted by the Agency, but it was pretty clear he works for Director Harmon. Not least because there were at least three Agents on the bridge of his carrier.”
It took Brad a few seconds to process the several surprises in there. Antonio Harmon was the Director of the Agency, Brad’s ultimate boss when he wore that hat. And, apparently, he had an entire carrier group swanning around at his orders.
“A carrier, Suzuki?” Michelle asked.
“Yeah. Scorpio,” Horatio’s Captain confirmed. “Almost gave me a panic moment, but she’s CV-03 and had all the right codes. They’re Fleet, not Cadre.” He shook his head. “And Agency. They had all of our people hustled off the station within an hour of arriving. Took possession of everything, even the Phoenix’s shuttle and its computers.
“With a drone carrier and four destroyers watching me, I wasn’t going to argue,” he admitted. “That said, well, we’d already copied everything left of the Phoenix’s computers. I don’t begrudge the Agency their data, but I figured we had as much right to it as anyone.”
Brad traded a glance with his wife. Suzuki knew they worked with the Agency a lot but didn’t know that Brad was actually an Agency operative.
Director Harmon, though, definitely did. To shuffle Brad’s people off like that…well, the right hand didn’t seem to be talking to the left.
“Get anything useful?” Brad finally asked.
“I barely know computer code from great literature,” Suzuki told them cheerfully. “Reece, however, cracked some of the key files before we left.”
Tisha Reece was one of Brad’s crackers, an exceptionally skilled group of experts he’d picked up to make sure computer security never got in his way. She was neither the first nor the best, but she was a close second-best. Assigning her to Horatio seemed to have broken in their favor.
“What kind of key files? Did she find out what ‘Red Diamond’ is?” Brad asked.
“No…but we may know where it is,” the junior Captain replied. “The Phoenix had a communication channel open to Earth at two separate times while he was aboard the shuttle. They wiped the recordings immediately, but the com buffers still recorded the direction the transmitters were pointed.”
“That’s pretty slim to go on,” Michelle pointed out.
“Yeah. And I’m not sure how Sergeant Reece pulled it off, but she pinged that both calls were directed from the same location. At Earth.”
“There’s a lot of crap in Earth’s orbit,” Brad replied. “That doesn’t narrow it down.”
“Even in Earth orbit, Commodore, there are only so many objects,” Suzuki told him. “I don’t know how Reece did it, it’s outside of my expertise like I said, but she’s flagged a small space station as the relay point.”
That…that was more than he’d dared hope for. If it was a single station, he might be able to get access, find data.
“We have no sanction to operate in Earth space,” Michelle reminded him. “The Guild, specifically, is banned from operating there.”
The Agency wasn’t…but it was also an established rule that the authority of the Commonwealth ended at Earth’s atmosphere. Its power didn’t, the economies of the Earthbound nations being utterly dependent on space-based resources now, but the Commonwealth explicitly had no authority on Earth.
Which meant even the Agency wasn’t supposed to operate on the ground, and a station in orbit almost certainly wasn’t the prison they were looking for.
“Good work, Captain,” Brad said slowly. “I think we owe Sergeant Reece another promotion. We’ll want her pulled over to Oath of Vengeance in any case.”
“Commodore?” Suzuki asked carefully.
“If she’s the one who cracked the data, she knows more than anyone what we’re looking at, so I’m taking her with me to Earth.”
Both his wife and his subordinate swallowed hard.
“Just Andrews, huh?” Brad asked. He didn’t think he recognized the name, but it niggled at him with its familiarity.
“Jessica Andrews?” his wife demanded.
“We didn’t get a full name,” Suzuki replied. “Why?”
Now Brad remembered.
“Because Jessica Andrews is a supposedly dead Senator who’s tied up with the Cadre,” Brad told Suzuki. “And if Mader was talking to Andrews, then this just went from urgent to yesterday.
“Michelle—start getting the ship ready to move. Suzuki—thank you. I might be able to save an old friend now, and it’s thanks to you.”
The ex-Fleet officer saluted.
“I only know half of what’s going on, sir,” he conceded. “But I’m certain that’s something I can feel good about.”
By the time Commodore Mark Fields made his way aboard, Oath of Vengeance’s crew was in full hustle. They were going to be double-bunking the ground teams, bringing extra fire teams over from all three of the other ships to make sure Brad had the firepower for his mission.
If any of his officers or mercenaries questioned why he was making sure he had two full platoons aboard for a flight to Earth, it seemed they trusted him. Beyond all sanity, in his opinion, but it was a good thing regardless.
“You’re looking busy,” Fields said as he shook Brad’s hand.
“We’ll be shipping out shortly,” Brad told him. “Something’s come up. My office, please?”
Fields nodded and followed him silently, taking in the urgency around the ship.
“Where are you going, Madrid?” he asked as the door shut behind him. “I’m pretty sure there’s nowhere in this star system more secure than your damn office, so tell me the truth.”
“I now know where Kate Falcone is being held prisoner,” Brad replied. “I may also know where what we believe to be a key Cadre financial supporter is hiding—and I have reason to think they’re the same place.”
Fields took a seat while thinking.
“You’d be more specific with me if it was anywhere in the Outer System,” he noted. “Between the Guild and the Agency, there’s only one place in the entire system you could be going that you wouldn’t want to tell me.”
Brad took his own seat, laying his hands on the desk and studying his old friend and sometime mentor across the plain plastic surface.
“And?” he asked calmly.
“What in Everdark are you planning on doing at Earth?” the Fleet Commodore said bluntly. “I’ll stretch my oaths pretty damn far, but if you’re taking a warship to Earth with intent…”
“Someone on Earth kidnapped Kate Falcone before she could testify to the Senate about Transplanetary Macro Fabrication supplying warships to the Cadre,” Brad pointed out. “Someone on Earth has to be paying for those warships, too. Someone on Earth recruited the officers the Cadre is using to man their fleet.
“Earth, Commodore, seems to be the center of more problems than we thought.”
Fields was silent again for several seconds, then sighed.
“You’re not Fleet, regardless of your auxiliary status,” he pointed out. “So, there’s things you don’t know, don’t see.”
“And?” Brad repeated.
“One of those is the readiness reports for the battleships,” Fields told him. “Fuel is expensive. They’re kept combat-ready, Brad, not travel-ready. Immortal shouldn’t have had enough fuel aboard for even a two-day flight, let alone the ten days to get to Ceres.
“Missiles, troops, mass-driver rounds? She’s fully stocked on all of those, but prepping her and her battle group to head out to Ceres? We’re talking at least four days. Maybe a week.”
“And she left, what, thirty hours after the attack?” Brad asked.
“Exactly. Someone knew, Brad,” the Fleet Commodore told him. “Someone knew long enough in advance to start getting a battleship task group ready—which means we could have had an entire squadron of cruisers in place to meet Lioness.”
“You were supposed to lose.”
Brad’s words hung in the room for a long time.
“Yeah,” Fields admitted. “Someone wanted an incident, a clear atrocity against civilians that would provoke…I don’t know what.”
“War.” Brad shook his head. “Senator Barnes said something about that, about a pro-war faction pushing to ‘bring the Outer System in line.’”
“Look, Brad, I can’t approve of you heading back to Earth with blood in your eyes,” the Fleet Commodore said quietly. “I can’t. But you’re right that something’s rotten back home. And if you are…how do you know who to trust?”
“I think I can trust Senator Barnes,” Brad told him. “I know I can trust you. A few key people at the Agency. It’ll be enough, Commodore. I’ll make it be enough.”
“And what happens when all the ducks come home to roost?” Fields asked. “Brad, this isn’t using nukes against a pirate base without authority. This is Earth. You’re talking about not just treason but…something close to blasphemy.”
“Someone’s already committed treason,” Brad pointed out. “And they’ve got my friend. Nothing else really matters, does it?”
Chapter Thirty-One
“Earth Orbital Control, this is the mercenary destroyer Oath of Vengeance, requesting orbital insertion slot,” Xan Wong said into the microphone. “We have safed our weapons and will stand by for Fleet escort.”
On their second trip to Earth, Brad’s people could guess the drill. They had every intention of being fully cooperative—right up until the moment he had to launch a hostile boarding action against a civilian station, anyway.
His coms officer listened to the response from EOC, shaking her head where they couldn’t see her.
“Same song as last time,” she reported. “Hold position outside Lunar orbit and stand by for Fleet escort. They want to know our business here.”
“Tell them it’s personal, we’re coming in to provide rest and relaxation, along with therapy for people injured in the Battle of Ceres.”
That was news all over the system. Brad wasn’t entirely enthused with his name being plastered across the news waves as a hero, but his people deserved the acclaim. The various news outlets were estimating they’d saved about three million lives, minimum.
Given that there weren’t that many people on Ceres, he figured they had to be overestimating that number somewhere.
Other than watching the news, the trip to Earth had been almost boring. They’d made sure to pass Task Group Immortal at a good distance, but the kilometer-long warship had been a sight nonetheless.
Brad had never seen one of the battleships in motion, let alone accompanied by an entire fleet. They might call it a task group, but he’d only ever seen forty-plus warships in one place before—when the Cadre had tried to take Blackhawk Station out at Saturn.
Those ships had been almost entirely corvettes and frigates. The frigates of Immortal’s escort alone would have outgunned that pirate fleet. Now, though…now they knew the Cadre had carriers and cruisers of their own.
Probably not battleships. Brad had lost a lot of his people keeping cruisers out of the Cadre’s hands, too, but he suspected they had at least another one on top of Lioness.
If they had a battleship, though, the Cadre would already control the Jovian Cluster.
“They confirm our intentions,” Xan replied after a few moments, then chuckled. She activated her microphone. “Heard and received, EOC. I’ll pass that on. Thanks.”
She put the headset down and turned back to Brad.
“Apparently, the EOC operator’s cousin is a VP at a company called Palace Resorts. They have resorts on the equator—plus hotels on Ceres. She’s sending me his contact information, figures we could get a deal through them.”
Br
ad wasn’t actually there for R&R, but that still warmed his heart. He supposed being called out as a hero had some advantages—he hadn’t expected deals on resorts to be among them!
“Well, it would look odd if we didn’t try and take advantage of that, wouldn’t it?” he asked. “Send the contact to Michelle. We’ll see if we can get something arranged.”
“Will do,” Xan promised.
“As for our actual mission…get in touch with Senator Barnes’s people. He and I need to talk.”
“I appreciate you making time for me, Senator,” Brad said as he was once again led into Barnes’s luxurious station-board apartment. For a man as busy and important as the sole Senator for the Jovian Cluster to have seen him within the week—let alone within the day as he’d managed—spoke to the strength of their relationship.
Which, given how heavily Brad was intending to impose on said relationship, was a good thing.
“We have a common set of goals at the moment, I think,” the Senator told him, filling two tall-stemmed wine glasses with purified water. “I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting to see you back at Earth yourself for a while yet, but your timing is impeccable. What have you learned?”
“I was hoping you’d learned a few things yourself,” Brad admitted. “I have some key pieces that should be enough for me to locate Agent Falcone, but…I’m frankly terrified of where they point.”
Barnes grunted.
“Home,” he guessed. “Specifically, the homeworld.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve managed to track down a copy of Agent Falcone’s evidence against TMF,” Barnes told Brad. “That was…far harder than it should have been. Unfortunately, we’ve lost a lot of her validation and support, so a hand-picked team of people from the Agency is working on that as we speak—and another handpicked team is currently purging the Agency’s Earthside personnel pool.”
Brad winced.
“That’s why I came to you,” he admitted. “I have grounds to believe the Agency is compromised. The control for our operating agent on Ceres sent her into a trap—and then sent a Cadre kill team to her location when she called for extraction.”
