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

by Glynn Stewart

  “We’re being directed to an operations center north of the city,” their pilot informed them. “The interim Governor is waiting for the skipper there.”

  “What do we know about the Governor?” Rice asked Kelly.

  Glad for the distraction, she brought up the MISS file.

  “Josephine Red Fox,” she read off as she refreshed her memory. “Earth native, from Canada. Spent ten years as a crisis counselor in the North America region, followed by another ten years as mobile conflict arbitrator for planetary issues. Entered the Martian Diplomatic Corps”—which was basically just Red Fox’s conflict arbitrator job on a new scale—“seven years ago.

  “The Mage-King sent her out directly from Mars with a staff of about five thousand,” she noted. “About half of those are cops; the rest are counselors and bureaucrats.”

  “She’s supposed to put an entire planet back together,” Rice murmured. “I don’t envy her the task.”

  “Doesn’t look like it’s the first time she’s been called in to put things back together after a Hand removed the obstacles,” Kelly told her captain.

  “Yeah.” Her boss studied her for a long few seconds. “Does ‘Hand Damien Montgomery’ sound as weird to you as it does to me?”

  She snorted.

  “I loved him, the fool I was,” she admitted. “But…no, not really.”

  When he’d left, he’d told her that he felt he had to go, to take on a burden others couldn’t carry. Kelly LaMonte hadn’t been happy to see him leave, but she’d understood. And because she’d understood, learning what he’d become didn’t really surprise her.

  “He was always going to find himself in bigger and bigger trouble, trying to help people,” she told her boss. “If he’s strong enough to be a Hand? He’s just going to keep trying to help people.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’ll probably kill him,” Kelly admitted. “It nearly killed all of us, but…he doesn’t have it in him to stand aside.”

  Rice coughed as if she’d touched a nerve, but he nodded as the shuttle swooped toward the ground.

  “Fair enough, I suppose. Let’s go talk to the Governor.”

  8

  Governor Red Fox was a tall woman with heavyset, dark-skinned features and night-black hair pulled back into a severe bun. As a Marine led David and LaMonte into the prefabricated office she was operating out of, three men in what appeared to be the uniform of the Ardennes planetary military stumbled out.

  Two looked to be in shock, where the third looked almost smug. David suspected their meeting with the interim Governor hadn’t gone the way they were expecting.

  “The Honorable Josephine Red Fox,” the Marine introduced the woman. “Captain David Rice and Officer Kelly LaMonte, of the merchant ship Red Falcon.”

  “Come in, come in,” Red Fox ordered briskly. “You’re the medical shipment from Madrigal, correct?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” David confirmed as he and LaMonte took the indicated seats. “It seemed a fair ways to reach out for humanitarian aid,” he said carefully, unsure if she was aware of their double life.

  “Madrigal is near to an RTA and relatively close on a direct flight taking that into account,” she told him. “We’ve been reaching out for supplies and personnel from everywhere we can reach. Mage-Governor Vaughn left a legacy of chaos and disruption that it’s going to take a lot of effort to put right.”

  David wasn’t sure just what the late Governor had been up to, but from LaMonte’s stiff expression next to him, Red Fox could easily be understating it.

  “That’s outside my purview, ma’am,” he admitted.

  “I know,” she agreed. “I insisted on meeting with all of the ship captains who arrived, Captain Rice, to get a feel for the people carrying our supplies. I won’t be here on Ardennes for more than a few years even in the worst case, and it is useful to know who can be relied on for safe shipment.”

  “We hope our reputation precedes us,” David demurred.

  “Oh, it does,” she told him. “Meeting with all of the captains also covers those in need of more…subtle meetings as well, doesn’t it?”

  She winked, and David nodded as he realized that she did know who he worked for—and didn’t necessarily trust this single-room prefabricated structure in the middle of a barely secured operations camp to be entirely secure.

  “I wouldn’t know, ma’am,” he told her. “How can I and Red Falcon be of assistance?”

  “I presume your contract included travel to another system for work afterwards?” she asked. “That shouldn’t be necessary. For all of the issues we’re addressing, the Ardennes economy continues to operate and produce their traditional exports…and I may have abrogated a large number of pre-existing shipping contracts while we investigate irregularities.

  “You should be able to find a cargo here, Captain Rice. I suggest you talk to my staff before you return to your ship. Especially Johannes Van Der Merwe. I believe they may have some useful information with regards to local shipping movements that may be of use to you.”

  Translation: Van Der Merwe is your MISS contact and has the data on the arms shipments. Also, You’re dismissed, Captain.

  “Thank you, Governor,” he told her, rising as another knock came on the door. “You appear busy.”

  “You have no idea,” a new voice told him as a bland-looking, almost mousy man in a plain suit stepped through. “Ma’am, we just got the latest reports from the Versailles Bastille. There’s been—”

  “Another riot, I’m guessing, Mikael?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the stranger confirmed. “Captain, if you can give us privacy, please?”

  “We were on our way out,” David told him.

  Johannes Van Der Merwe’s office was at almost the exact opposite side of the encampment. David recognized the style of the structures of the encampment from his time in the Navy—the Martian military used much the same prefabs everywhere.

  Unlike the Governor, Van Der Merwe’s office was inside another structure. This one was a three-story barracks unit, normally intended to hold a company of Marines and their administrative offices.

  The troops on the ground floor were definitely Marines, and they stopped David and LaMonte at the door with brisk efficiency.

  “Sir, can I help you?” the Corporal in charge of the guard detail asked crisply.

  “We’re here to meet with Johannes Van Der Merwe,” David replied.

  “May I see your ID?” the Marine asked.

  David considered the situation carefully for several seconds and then tapped a command on his wrist-comp that transmitted a different ID from his usual to the Marine’s own wrist-comp.

  From the way the guard relaxed when she saw the details of the MISS identification codes, he’d made the right call.

  “Of course. Van Der Merwe is upstairs, on the top floor,” she told him. “Remember, Captain, Officer—whatever you see in here, this is just another security barracks. Understand?”

  David chuckled.

  “We understand completely,” he assured her as they were waved in. The main floor looked exactly as he’d expected, the quarters and secured armory for two platoons of Marines. The second floor, however, was fascinating.

  The designers of the prefabricated structure had designed it to be defensible, not easily traversed. The stairs from the second story to the third were on the opposite side of the building from the stairs to the second story. Walking along the hallway, David glanced at the spaces around him and noted two distinct details.

  Firstly, one of the platoon living areas was gone, replaced with a data center even more secured than the armories downstairs.

  Secondly, none of the people on the second floor were wearing uniforms. They were all in civilian clothing—but here, at least, they moved like soldiers.

  “FCI?” LaMonte murmured to him as they passed the undercover agents.

  “Maybe,” David said. “Possibly…PSS, actually.”

  Th
e Protectorate Secret Service wasn’t part of MISS or the Marine Corps. They reported directly to the Hands and the Mage-King, serving as both bodyguards and covert agents for the Mage-King’s troubleshooters.

  His guess would be that the building was a mix of MISS, Marine Forward Combat Intelligence and PSS people. Agents, analysts…the “security barracks” was the beating heart of Martian intelligence ops on Ardennes right now.

  Any doubt he had on that disappeared when they reached the top floor and were met by a pair of young men with the gold medallions of Mages in unmarked black fatigues. Their medallions marked them as Combat Mages and they carried themselves like Marines.

  “Captain Rice,” the taller Mage greeted him with a nod. “Director Van Der Merwe is waiting for you. You’re expected. Please wait one moment.”

  The other Mage produced a scanner and ran it over them while the first Mage studied them with magic.

  “Director?” he murmured to the guards.

  “Van Der Merwe is the Regional Director for MISS operations in this area of the MidWorlds,” the bodyguard Mage told him. “They’ll brief you more once you’re inside.”

  It seemed that Ardennes was being treated with the utmost importance. The Martian Interstellar Security Service only had ten Regional Directors!

  The Director was not…quite what David had been expecting. He hadn’t had enough experience with the senior members of the MISS to really have formed an opinion of what they were like, but he realized he’d been unconsciously expecting someone along the lines of Alaura Stealey: a gray-haired middle-aged woman with a spine of iron.

  Johannes Van Der Merwe was none of these things. The Director had short-cropped black hair, night-black skin, and an androgynous body type that defied any attempt to gender them. They wore a tight-fitting bodysuit in a deep purple tone David suspected would sparkle when hit with light.

  The Director’s eyes warned David that anyone who underestimated them wouldn’t last long. They sprang up as David and LaMonte entered the room, shaking both of their hands in silence and directing them to chairs as the Director poured coffee.

  David was unsurprised when Van Der Merwe made both his and LaMonte’s drinks exactly as they preferred before returning, still silent, to the seat behind the desk and smiling at them.

  “Captain Rice,” the Director finally said. “It’s a pleasure. Your reputation precedes you, of course. I’ve followed your career with us with some interest. It’s not often Hands directly recruit people for us.”

  “The Hands do what they wish, and the rest of us mere mortals simply follow along and try to keep up,” David agreed. “Hand Stealey was an intimidating woman, but there was never any question about her goals.”

  “There generally isn’t, with the Hands,” Van Der Merwe agreed. “I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Hand Montgomery, though I understand you have?”

  “He worked with us before Hand Stealey recruited him.”

  “It almost feels as if I’ve met him, I have to say,” the Director continued with a nod. “Much of the aftermath here shows his hand. He made quite the impression on the Freedom Wing—and it’s made my job much easier.”

  “How so?” David asked carefully.

  “Most of the Wing’s leadership has taken what appears to have been his advice to heart and vanished from the public eye,” Van Der Merwe said. “There’s a few exceptions, to the good and the bad, but they seem to understand that we can’t just let the rebels take over.

  “Mikael Riordan, for example, has stepped up as Governor Red Fox’s main local advisor. He’s proven reliable and gets where we’re all coming from, which makes him worth his weight in gold. Some others have been less…helpful in their visibility, but that is life, I suppose.”

  They shrugged.

  “Since, thankfully, the ex-Wing members regard the Protectorate as an ally instead of an enemy now, they’ve been extraordinarily willing to fill us in on where their weapons and supplies came from,” Van Der Merwe concluded. “At least some of them realize that Legatus was setting them up—others were apparently present when the original unofficial offer of assistance was made and rejected.”

  “Wait, what?” David asked.

  “Yes.” The Director nodded calmly. “At some point, around when the Freedom Party was still in the Planetary Parliament but the structure of the Wing was already taking shape, Ms. Armstrong was approached covertly by agents of the Legatus Military Intelligence Directorate.

  “They offered to fund and arm her rebellion in exchange for holding a referendum on making Ardennes an UnArcana World once they were in power. Armstrong refused.”

  Lori Armstrong had been the politician who’d created the Freedom Party, managed to get six seats in the Planetary Parliament, and then later given up and formed the Freedom Wing for more direct action.

  “She refused?” LaMonte asked. “I would have expected her to take any help.”

  “So did Legatus,” Van Der Merwe guessed. “When she refused their direct help, they decided to make sure she still had the ability to cause trouble. They clearly funneled large quantities of arms and high-quality aircraft and gear to her rebellion through other channels.”

  “Those channels are what we’re supposed to follow back,” David said grimly. “Whatever data we can get will help.”

  “We’re crunching data still,” the Director confessed. “My on-planet resources are still quite limited versus the scale of what we face, and frankly, making sure we’ve cleaned up Vaughn’s secret police is a higher immediate priority.

  “We’ll hand over all of the data we got from the Wing and that we’ve identified out of the shipping logs. I’ve got the levers in place to arrange a shipping contract to…well, anywhere you’re likely to be going.”

  “I’m guessing you have at least an idea?” David asked.

  Van Der Merwe shrugged.

  “The usual suspects,” he admitted. “The guns came from all over, but…the aircraft came through Amber.”

  “Of course they did,” David said with a sigh. Amber was a perennial headache for the Protectorate, a world founded by libertarians from the old United States on Earth. They had a legal system best described as “loose,” which made the system a useful stopover point for transshipping illegal cargo.

  It also happened to be the star system where David’s girlfriend lived and, among other things, ran an underground syndicate dedicated to supplying arms to the resistance movements that met relatively strict criteria around goals and morals.

  They’d need to go through MISS’s data…but he wasn’t going to be surprised if he found Keiko Alabaster’s lovely long fingers tucked into this mess.

  And wasn’t that going to be an awkward date conversation?

  9

  “It wasn’t easy.”

  The softly attractive blonde woman in the video looked tired. That was fair, David reflected, since the date in the video was only a handful of days after Lori Armstrong had helped Damien Montgomery overthrow a planetary government.

  She shook her head in response to the question of where their weapons had come from.

  “It wasn’t easy,” she repeated. “Even then, I was kind of relieved by that. Even when I wanted to buy enough weapons to equip an army, I didn’t really want it to be easy.

  “We started by sending six people we trusted completely to six different systems with a hundred million in untraceable credit chips apiece,” she explained. “Reputation and rumor gave us at least a few places to start, but we knew nothing about dealing with smugglers and the underworld.”

  She chuckled.

  “I regretted turning the Legatans down more than once. Never enough to try and reach out to the agents who’d contacted me, but there were days…”

  “Where did you send those agents?” the unseen interviewer asked.

  “Where do you think?” Armstrong snorted. “Amber. Corinthian. Chrysanthemum. Others as well, though we weren’t successful at most of them. Chrysanthemum exports
arms and vehicles, but I wasn’t sure how successful we’d be buying from them without an official license.

  “Amber we knew we could buy from. Transport would be hell, but Amber’s laws meant we could at least pick up small arms and ammunition. But we needed aircraft and ground vehicles…and we couldn’t get them at home.

  “Vaughn had Ardennes’s military manufacturing tied up close.” She sighed. “Corinthian was a bust. A bad one. Our agent is in a Corinthian medium-security prison, along with the folks she tried to buy from. That system’s underworld was in a mess when we tried to get involved. Bad timing on our part.”

  David grimaced. That was, well, almost entirely his fault. Montgomery had ended up in a Corinthian jail and he’d broken his Mage out. Along the way, he’d pointed Hand Stealey at a significant chunk of the local underworld.

  “Chrysanthemum went better than expected. We should probably have been suspicious when the gear started showing up and it was all Legatan-made instead of Chrysanthemum, but there were so many layers and cutouts that the man who made the purchase was in a different star system when the gunships arrived.

  “That was really only the gunships, though. They made a hell of a difference in the end, but that was all that came through that funnel. Everything else…everything else was at least purchased through Amber.

  “We were told it was being bought from third parties to help cover our Amberite contacts’ trail,” she noted. “Helped salve our suspicions when the top-line stuff was Legatan. A lot of it was from Amber, too, but the coms gear and the lasers and so forth…all Legatan.”

  “And that didn’t make you suspicious?”

  “I had other concerns at the time,” Armstrong said drily. “Like the fact that my planetary Governor was arranging for fatal ‘accidents’ for the handful of elected MPs we still had in the Parliament. Or the latest round of government-‘assisted’ buyouts of corporations that weren’t owned by Vaughn’s cronies.”