Voice of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  #

  “We’ve found her, my lord.”

  Jakab’s quiet words interrupted Damien’s review of the data Sherwood had provided on the Antonius system’s recent issues with claim-jumping. About the only conclusion he’d reached so far was that the Sherwood data was completely one-sided, and that he needed Míngliàng’s data of claim-jumping by Sherwood miners for comparison.

  “The Mistletoe Solstice?” he asked. It was unlikely they’d found anything else, but details could be important.

  “Yes,” Jakab confirmed. “The Alan-a-dale found her, actually,” he admitted. “We tracked the debris plume to the impact site, but she’d clearly been underway when she was damaged.” The Mage-Captain shook his head on the video screen.

  “She’s been shot up bad,” he continued, throwing an image of the freighter on Damien’s screen. “All of her cargo pods are missing, and she’d been set on a vector that would take her a long way away from the jump zone.”

  “Any life signs?” Damien asked quietly.

  “None. We don’t think she even has atmosphere, and there are no power or electrical signatures either,” Jakab said softly. “She’s completely dead.”

  Damien studied the ship. The freighter had been a big ship, an eight-megaton, five-rotator design almost two kilometers long. The engines were gone. In fact, the entire rear section of the ship where the rotators would have converged on them was missing. All the rotating ribs showed the torque and blast damage inevitable from that hit.

  A command to his computer brought up a bit more information, and he sighed.

  “Sherwood registry. Two hundred and fourteen crew,” he said aloud. “Are we able to tow her home?”

  “We should be,” the Mage-Captain confirmed. “I’ll want to send a team over to make sure she’s safe before we get too close.”

  “Of course,” Damien agreed. “As I understand, you have a full forensics team aboard, correct?”

  “From the PSS, yes. I take it you want to send them over as well?”

  “I need to know what killed that ship, Mage-Captain. I’ll talk to Agent Amiri. Get your boarding team prepped, and her people will come along for the ride.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  The Mage-Captain’s video screen closed, and Damien looked past it to the empty stars around the ship. His window, linked to the ship’s computers, was automatically highlighting the one tiny light that was all he could see of the ten thousand kilometer distant Alan-a-dale, but otherwise all he saw was empty sky.

  He hit a command, linking to Amiri’s private com.

  “Julia, can you come in please?”

  The door to his office slid open almost instantly, and he shook his head at his bodyguard as she entered the observation deck and crossed over to him.

  “This ship has hundreds of Marines, even if we ignore the entire detail of Secret Service agents you brought with you,” he said mildly. “Why are you standing outside my door?”

  “I do my best thinking standing,” Amiri replied. “May as well stand someplace that helps me keep an eye on you. What do you need?”

  “Jakab found the Mistletoe Solstice,” he told her. “She’s dead in the water, badly damaged. No survivors, no life signs, no energy signatures. He’s taking a team over, and I want him to borrow the forensics people the PSS assigned you.”

  “That’s what that team is for,” she agreed. “I’ll have them suit up and we’ll join Jakab’s team in fifteen.”

  “‘We’, Agent?” Damien asked with an arched eyebrow. “If this is a trap, Julia, I don’t want you caught in it.”

  “If this is a trap, my lord, I don’t want my people caught in it,” she replied. “I’m better at spotting and evading traps than Jakab’s Marines, let alone a bunch of tech and bio geeks I barely trust to put a space-suit on right!

  “And,” she continued with a familiar grin, “you did just point out that I’m redundant guarding your door.”

  “I could use direct eyes on the scene,” Damien conceded, recognizing that he wasn’t going to win the fight without pulling rank hard. “Fine, Julia. But be careful – I want you, your geeks, and Jakab’s Marines back in the same number of pieces you leave in.”

  “Please, Damien – bringing people back alive used to be my specialty.”

  “Yes, but then you were allowed to tie them up,” he pointed out. “Just… be careful.”

  Chapter 20

  The Sergeant in charge of the Marine squad assembling in the Duke of Magnificence’s shuttle bay wasn’t familiar to Julia. She gave him a wave that almost approximated a salute as she and her four forensics techs entered the cavernous space.

  He, in turn, snapped a parade ground-perfect salute, marred only slightly by the fact that he was wearing the bottom half of an exosuit. His squad were already mostly in their gear, locking on helmets and picking up the over-sized weapons they would carry in this kind of boarding action.

  The Marines dwarfed Amiri and the other Secret Service agents, who were clad in skin-tight regular space-suits. Of course, the Secret Service version of those suits was as well armored as any un-powered armor the Marine Corps issued.

  “Sergeant Mark Garroway,” he introduced himself. “Hunter Squad. We’re your tour guides on this lovely safari the Protectorate is sending us on today.”

  As he spoke he continued to settle the bulky pieces of his armor around himself and latch them into place. When he finished, he picked up the big helmet and locked in on over his head.

  “Check gear,” he ordered his men. The faceless helmet rotated towards Julia. “Your crew need any help?”

  “The Secret Service trains them well,” she replied. “And I checked them all before I let them come anywhere near your boys. This ‘safari’ is almost certainly going to be morgue detail, you know.”

  “I know,” he agreed, and she started as she realized he’d switched to a direct com link between their helmets. “And your agents know. And my Marines know. And they’ll deal with it when we face it, but Horned One knows, I’m not inclined to rub their faces in it.”

  “I can respect that,” she agreed. “Got a shuttle picked out for us?” she asked aloud.

  “Delta-Two,” he confirmed, gesturing to the nearest of the Duke’s assault shuttles. The deadly looking spacecraft could easily carry the seventeen people in Garroway’s squad and her team, and packed enough firepower to make a big enough hole to extract them if needed. “The Navy has even promised a ride back this time.”

  “Then let’s get going,” Julia suggested. “We wouldn’t want them to change their minds.”

  The faceless helmet couldn’t nod, but she got the impression of the gesture anyway as Garroway turned away from her and started corralling his twelve man squad aboard the shuttle. The exosuits were, hopefully, overkill.

  But if they ended up needing them, she’d be glad to have them!

  #

  “On final approach to Mistletoe Solstice,” the shuttle pilot reported. “Main docking bay is just plain gone, folks, I’m going to bring you in as close to the wreckage of the keel as possible and extend a tube, but you may still need to jump.”

  “Understood,” Garroway replied crisply. “Squad, you heard the man, be ready to rock-and-roll!”

  Focusing on her own team, Julia gave their suits a quick visual check-over. For all that her four Agents were trained with the mini-rocket carbines they were carrying, this team were mostly forensics and computer techs – and most of their load was the technical gear for that trade.

  “Watch your suits when we make the transfer,” she instructed them. “The wreckage is going to be a mess and cutting your suit open twenty thousand kay from the Duke will suck. Your armor should protect you, but I need you finding out what happened here, not stuck in an emergency bubble needing to be towed home.”

  That got chuckles, but also serious double checking of the straps securing gear and weapons. Only one of the four was on their first boarding ever, though she didn’t think an
y of them had seen anything as bad as what she was expecting.

  “All right people,” the pilot announced. “We are locked in place twenty meters back from what’s left of the keel. I can’t get any closer without risking the bird. Give me a second to run the tube out and…” He paused. A moment later, he spoke again, with triumph in his voice.

  “All right, we got the tube almost all the way in. Just a meter or so gap, but mind the sharp and pointy bits.”

  “Marines first, ma’am,” Garroway promptly told Julia, gesturing his squad forward.

  “Semper fi!” the first exosuited soldier bellowed on the group channel and launched off. The shuttle had no gravity; everyone had been held into their seats with straps. A ‘gentle’ push from the powered suit of armor sent the man cannonballing out the inflated tube.

  For all the apparent idiocy of the movement, the Marine was also using his exosuit’s jets to control and direct his movement, and was inside the freighter in moments. The rest of his squad was only moments behind him.

  Julia, for her part, waited for the giant metal men and women to lead the way into the wreck, then followed at a more sedate pace. Her suit had similar maneuverability to theirs, but it lacked the centimeter-thick armor.

  A sigh echoed over her private channel with Garroway as she cleared the shuttle and started down the tube. “Your boys are going to need to break out DNA kits,” he told her. “Looks like we weren’t the first to come in this way.”

  Drifting into the main corridor running down the keel, Julia immediately saw what he meant. A massive containment door had cut off the back half of the ship when it had been blasted off, and anyone outside that door had been dead either when it closed or moments later.

  Now, there was a hole blasted clean through that door, and suited bodies visibly floated in the microgravity of the dead ship, catching the lights of the Marine’s helmets.

  “Check it out,” she ordered her team, assessing the situation as she jetted herself closer to where the Marines were cutting the door open to allow space for their suits. Someone had tried to make a stand here; all of the space-suited figures held weapons of some kind.

  The walls were pockmarked with bullet holes where the defenders and attackers had traded fire, but if any of the attackers had gone down they’d taken the bodies with them.

  “Tagging the bodies for retrieval,” her bio tech told her. “I’ve got DNA samples so we can run IDs on Duke. If you,” the tech gestured to the Marines, “want to gently get them against the wall, it’ll make everyone’s job easier.”

  Exosuits were massive layers of armor, machinery and powered motors laid over a human body, as much piloted as worn. They had the power to rip through walls and break men in half.

  They also had the precision and care to allow the Marines to carefully and respectfully move the dead crewmembers of the Mistletoe Solstice against one of the walls, out of the way but easily retrievable by the morgue detail.

  “Let’s get to the bridge,” Julia ordered. “Most likely our answers – and any traps – are there.”

  #

  The journey down the length of the ship was a tortuous affair as the containment doors located every fifty meters had all slammed shut. Each had a hole blasted into it to enable the boarders to continue, though only a handful of holes were large enough for the Marine exosuits.

  Once they’d passed the first door, they didn’t encounter any sign of anyone for easily half the ship. The only light in the shadowy hall was from their hand and helmet lights, and the lack of air suppressed any sound.

  Halfway through the ship, they found the first sign of a fight since the initial entryway. At the middle of the keel was the spherical simulacrum chamber where the two Ship’s Mages would have jumped the starship – and at least one Mage had made her stand in the corridors outside it.

  The containment door just short of the simulacrum chamber had been exploded outwards, and Julia winced as she envisaged the debris that would have gone scything through the boarding party when the explosives involved had triggered.

  Scorch and blast marks covered the walls, the distinctive signs to her eyes of a Mage going all out with nothing to lose. Again, any of the attacker’s bodies had been removed, but the Secret Service Agent could guess that easily dozens of men had died here.

  It hadn’t saved anyone. The Marines jetted forward, securing the section and sweeping it with their more powerful lights, and her bio techs checked over the bodies. It was hard to say which had been the Mage…for that matter, it was hard to say how many bodies there were.

  The attackers had gone for overkill, and from the state of the bodies had brought up multiple fully automatic grenade launchers. Whoever they were, they hadn’t been trying to take prisoners. The defenders had to have been in suits to be alive, but the mess of parts made it impossible to tell.

  “Tag the pile and leave them,” she ordered her people, swallowing hard. “We can identify the dead later, I need to know what happened here now.”

  Even through space-suits, she could see her people’s urge to rebel and disobey, but after a moment she got sharp nods.

  “Take us forward, Garroway,” she instructed.

  #

  The Mistletoe Solstice’s crew had made a final stand in front of the bridge. There hadn’t been many of them left, with most of the crew trapped or killed on the rotators and in engineering, but they’d done the best they could.

  The attackers had kept the grenade launchers they’d used against the Mage mid-ships, and the results had been no prettier here. It would take Julia’s techs hours to sort through the debris, identifying bodies.

  Someone had been in a rush by the time the boarding had reached here and the vicious slaughter showed it. The crude barricades the crew had assembled had been shoved aside, the bodies callously crushed beneath debris as the attackers had proceeded to use explosives to blast open the bridge security door.

  The bridge, a separate section from the simulacrum chamber on a civilian ship like this, hadn’t survived the explosives or the following attack well. Several of the consoles had been shattered by debris, and gunfire had ruined more. The captain’s chair was a wreck, riddled with bullets and targeted by at least one grenade.

  The captain, however, had apparently survived the attack. A figure, clad in a space-suit of slightly but noticeably higher quality than the rest of the crew, floated in the middle of the bridge. His hands had been tied together, and the cable then attached to the remnants of his chair.

  At some point, presumably after tying him up, someone had cut a series of slashes in the suit. The suit was of high enough quality to independently seal sections, which had kept the captain alive as sections of his body were exposed to vacuum.

  Julia jetted over to him, examining him. The figure turned in the microgravity as she touched it, rotating to show her the shattered ruin of the face of an older black man. A single bullet had been fired through the faceplate and his forehead at point blank range.

  “Whatever they wanted from him, I don’t think they got it,” she said softly.

  “What makes you say that?” Garroway asked, the Marine carefully locking himself to the deck next to her. “Looks like they tortured him for info and then shot him in the head.”

  “Simple – he was grinning,” Julia replied, gesturing to the permanently frozen expression on the freighter captain’s face. “Who was he?” she snapped to her staff.

  “Captain Tendai Afolayan,” one of the bio techs replied, tagging the captain’s body and taking a blood sample. “Sherwood native, owner-operator of the Mistletoe Solstice for ten years. Two of the ship’s officers were his kids, and one of the Mages was his granddaughter, a Mage by Right.”

  “Damn, he must have been happy when she tested for the Gift,” Julia said softly. A family of merchant officers and a family ship – a Mage in the family must have seemed a God-send.

  “He paid for her to study on Mars,” the tech confirmed, skimming through the data
on her faceplate projection. “She only joined the ship six months ago, was the junior Ship’s Mage.”

  “And we found her at the Simulacrum chamber,” the senior agent concluded grimly, glancing over at the faceless suit of the Marine squad leader. Exosuits didn’t transmit much body language, but they did a surprisingly good job with homicidal rage.

  “Thoughts, Sergeant?” she asked on their private channel, hoping to bring him back to ground.

  “This doesn’t look like pirates,” he ground out. “Afolayan’s people fought like demons. The bastards took their dead with them, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t lose fifty or sixty guys getting this far. Pirates wouldn’t take those losses – once the ship was disabled they could detach the cargo and leave. Why didn’t they?”

  “Do we know what she was carrying?” Julia asked, glancing back at the same tech. She was still examining Afolayan, while the other bio tech was checking on the other bodies in the room and the two computer techs poked at the consoles to see if anything was intact enough to try to pull data from.

  “Just ore from Antonius,” she reported. “Platinum, titanium, gold, uranium… hundred million or so in high content rock. All of which is gone, but…”

  “Nothing in that which would require them to board the ship at all,” she concluded. “If they just wanted to be sure everybody died, a few more blasts with the laser that vaporized the back of the ship would do it. Why board it at all?”

  “Ma’am, the black box is gone,” the senior of her computer techs interrupted to report. He was floating at the rear of the bridge, inspecting an access panel. “Someone physically ripped it out and took it with them.”

  “So, they disabled the ship instead of killing her completely,” Julia noted. “They stole her cargo, and then they boarded her to remove the black box. It’s… like they wanted us to find her, and to have no idea who killed her.”