“No, probably not,” she agreed. Her tone softened…slightly.
“You just told me you know everything is going to shit,” he reminded her. “Something is wrong in the Protectorate, Keiko. Someone is stirring the pot. It could be the Families—God knows Julian Falcone didn’t stay in jail very long!—or it could be some unknown factor or another crime syndicate.
“What we know right now is that Legatus offered the rebellion on Ardennes military hardware if they agreed to a vote on UnArcana World status after they took over,” David explained. “We also know that even though they declined, most of the heavy gear that ended up in their hands was Legatan. We need to track it back, Keiko. We need to know if Legatus is trying to break up the Protectorate.”
She was silent for a long time.
“Stealey’s dead, huh?” she finally asked.
“Mage-Governor Vaughn poisoned her, apparently,” he confirmed. “I can’t lay that one on Legatus, but it does give a certain urgency to the matter.”
“Even when the Legacy was after you with fleets, you never came to me for more than safe harbor,” Keiko said quietly. “Why this? Why now?”
“Because I know Nathan Seule wouldn’t want to be involved in somebody’s scheme to tear apart humanity,” he told her. “I know he’ll help me if I ask him…but I can’t find him. And I know no one other than you who can.”
Keiko grabbed the next cocktail almost before David had finished making it, and stalked over to the hotel room window, looking out over Garnet’s streets.
“You were never an easy one,” she said quietly. “You’re right. Seule wouldn’t want to be used like that—I know I wouldn’t. I wasn’t involved in this particular chain, though, if you were wondering.”
“I didn’t think you were,” David told her. “If nothing else, I’m pretty sure you don’t have channels to acquire barely last-gen Legatan gear.”
“No,” she confirmed. “My heavy hardware is usually Tau Cetan…or, hell, Martian. Almost never Legatan, and it isn’t new when it is.” She shook her head. “That stinks, David.”
“A lot. But we need more than a bad smell to allow us to move against a Core World,” he told her. “So, I need to follow the chain back, and the first link I have is Nathan Seule.”
“I don’t know where he is,” she admitted. “I have ways to get ahold of him, but I don’t know where he is right now.”
She was still looking away from him, studying the city beneath her.
“If Legatus is behind this, you realize what that means, right?” she asked.
“War.”
The word hung in the air like a crashing anvil. Civil war, rebellion…secession was the best case, but if Legatus was already stirring the pot this much, they were expecting it to get violent. With the amount of blood David suspected they were responsible for, they were all but guaranteeing it would get violent.
“Do you want to be responsible for that?”
“I want to know,” David said grimly. “That’s the job I took, Keiko. To make sure that the guilty get caught and the innocent go free. If it isn’t Legatus, someone is playing us all for fools—and if it is, I need hard proof to back up our stack of circumstances.”
She turned away from the window and crossed to him so swiftly, he barely registered her moving before she’d wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his shoulder.
“I don’t have it in me to stand aside,” he told her. “Neither do you.”
“No,” she agreed. She lifted her head to kiss him.
“I don’t know where he is, but I can make arrangements for him to be somewhere,” Keiko Alabaster concluded. “I’ll make you haul a cargo for me to meet him, but you can call that fair trade for the information.”
“More than,” he confirmed. “I’m sorry to drag you into this, but I had nowhere else to turn.”
“I know,” she agreed. “And it needs to be done. But I’m not happy. That said, if you”—she touched his face gently—“think I’m mad enough to let you get out of this star system without sleeping with me, you have another think coming!”
13
“Officer LaMonte!”
The person shouting Kelly’s name was a stranger to her, a tall, heavyset woman with shoulder-length blond hair and a black uniform.
“That would be me,” she told her, ducking past a zero-gee cargo hauler with practiced ease and grabbing on to a handhold. “What can I help you with, Ms.…”
“Major Angelika Turati,” the officer introduced herself as she pulled herself to a halt next to Kelly. “I’m with the ADC, supervising the cargo off-load.”
The bay Kelly was currently working in was on Heinlein Station but had been taken over by Red Falcon’s crew. Many of their secondary cargos were too small to fill even a single ten-thousand-ton container, so bays like this were designed to take two or three containers from a cargo ship and allow crews to open them up and divide their cargo.
They were on the third round of breaking out containers, and Kelly had rented enough bays to handle ten containers at a time. Another twenty units remained for them to get clear, but this was the most time-intensive part of off-loading.
“Last I checked, the last of your units came off our spars forty-six minutes ago,” Kelly told Turati. “The tugs flashed the correct ID, which means you’ve got your cargo.”
“That we do,” Turati confirmed. “We’ve completed our initial scans and everything is in place.” She offered a thin tablet over to Kelly. “If you can thumbprint here, we’ll send over your payment.”
Kelly felt some of the tension in her shoulders release. There’d been enough money in the penalty the ADC had tried to level on Ardennes that she’d worried that they’d try to play games.
“I have to admit, we didn’t actually expect the cargo to arrive,” Turati confessed as she reclaimed the tablet. “Yet here you are, a full day inside the deadline.”
“Your people did threaten Ardennes with quite the penalty,” Kelly pointed out.
The ADC officer chuckled.
“And we weren’t really bluffing,” she agreed. “We were, admittedly, expecting the Protectorate to intervene. Probably to negotiate a lesser penalty and then pay it on Ardennes’s behalf. We didn’t even know if they had a ship that could make the delivery.”
“Lucky for everyone we happened to be there, then,” Falcon’s XO told her. There wasn’t much luck involved, not when MISS was moving the pieces. “Why does the ADC even need this much refined metal? Unless that’s classified?”
Turati shrugged.
“We don’t really do classified around here, Officer LaMonte,” she admitted. “The ADC is expanding, and there’s been a lot of arguments over whether we’re going to build the ships here or buy them elsewhere. If nothing else, we’re going to be upgrading our orbital defenses and building more in-system corvettes. It won’t go to waste.”
“Who do you expect to attack you here?” Kelly asked. It wasn’t really an idle question. There were worse-defended systems than Amber in the Protectorate, though most MidWorlds were better secured. Part of Amber’s defense was always the knowledge that it headquartered most of the Protectorate’s legal and semi-legal mercenary forces.
“That’s well over my head,” the ADC Major admitted with a smile. “I know there’s a lot of talk about anti-pirate convoys and patrols. I doubt anyone’s worrying about Amber, per se, but it never hurts to be safe.”
“That’s true enough,” Kelly agreed, turning to watch the massive crate containing a portable fusion power generator get carefully maneuvered out of the shipping container. Amber was more lightly defended than most systems with their wealth. She could see the temptation to a powerful pirate.
“You’d think the destruction of Darkport and the Blue Star would reduce piracy,” she sighed.
Turati snorted.
“Who understands the criminal mind?” the Amberite asked. “I barely understand the rest of the Protectorate, let alone the kind of sick cr
ew that decides to take up piracy.”
Kelly had just completed her sweep of the four cargo bays handling the breakdown of Red Falcon’s cargo when her wrist-comp chimed with an incoming call. She hadn’t heard from Captain Rice since he’d gone down to the planet the previous evening—she hadn’t expected to, to be honest—but she wasn’t surprised to see his name come up.
“LaMonte,” she answered the call, drifting into a quiet corner of the zero-gee gravity bay. “How was your evening, boss?”
“Better than I was afraid of,” he told her. “How are we on offloading?”
“All of the main cargo is done, and ADC has signed and paid for delivery,” she replied. “We’re two or three hours from being done with the breakouts, and we’ll have the rest of the secondaries off the spars by then too.
“Refueling will be getting started once I’m back aboard. We had no problems sourcing antimatter, even if the price made me wince.”
“It always does,” her Captain replied. “So, we’ll be able to start loading a new cargo in, say, six hours?”
“We could start in three,” she suggested. “I’d rather have at least a few hours to cycle teams and let the crews rest, especially if we have any secondaries we need to assemble.”
“Nothing like that,” Rice told her. “One ten-million-ton cargo, proper containers. It’ll be shifted over to us by tugs from one of the orbital depots. No secondaries, and we’re not filing a flight plan with anyone.”
Kelly winced. Amber was the only system in the Core or MidWorlds where they could even do that. They filed false flight plans a lot, and no one really checked up on them outside the Core unless someone came looking, but still. There was a reason for the requirement, after all.
“Do I want to know what we’re hauling?” she asked carefully.
“One of Keiko’s specials. Manifest will come by encrypted relay through her people,” he told her. “Standard containers, thousand units. There’s a time premium on this, but not enough of one to rush the loading.
“Six hours will be fine.”
The manifest was eye-opening.
Kelly had heard the cargo they’d hauled for Keiko Alabaster before referred to as “a revolution in a box.” She’d only been a junior engineer then, though, and hadn’t seen the details.
This was ten times the size of that shipment and was more than a revolution in a box. It was an entire state in a box. A million rifles and suits of body armor. Twenty thousand tanks and an equal number of aircraft. Prefabricated maintenance depots for all of the gear. Communications arrays, satellites, mobile headquarters…
And that was just the blatantly military component. Two full ten-thousand-ton containers were just earthmoving equipment. Several more just…buildings. A grade of prefabricated structure Kelly hadn’t encountered before. Everything from small offices to police stations to what looked like a government house, packed flat with “easy” assembly instructions.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Rice asked from the door of her office, and she looked up in surprise.
“When did you get back aboard?”
He made a show of checking the time on his wrist-comp. “Four minutes ago? I came straight here from the airlock. I figured you’d need the same explanation Keiko gave me.”
“This isn’t just guns, boss,” she pointed out. “This is…the entire infrastructure of a government. Where are we even going with this?”
“Darius,” Rice replied instantly. “It’s an UnArcana Fringe World; I hadn’t heard of it before Keiko and I started going over this cargo.”
“The name’s crossed my path, but I don’t know much,” Kelly admitted. She only really knew anything about the UnArcana worlds she’d actually visited. The Protectorate had just over a hundred star systems and she couldn’t keep track of them all, let alone the class of worlds jump-ships often avoided.
“Nobody does, which is why they’re having the problems they’re having,” her Captain said grimly. “They’re under blockade by a private corporate fleet out of Legatus. They had a Legatan-provided defense force, but…” He sighed.
“Darius had an election a year ago, and a coalition of parties determined to end their UnArcana status took control of the government,” he explained, clearly echoing and summarizing what he’d been told. “Portions of the prior government refused to recognize the transfer of power, and most of the defense force backed them.
“From what Keiko knows, it got ugly and their entire original space defense is just…gone,” he concluded. “The attempted coup didn’t die with the space fleet, unfortunately, and they got Stellarite Development Corps involved. SDC sent a fleet of jump-ships to blockade the system.”
“So, the elected government is losing,” Kelly said grimly.
“Most of the military forces on the planet wiped each other out in the first six months,” he noted. “There’s no one on the surface with the equipment for the mass manufacture of modern arms, and the government controls the only spaceport. The SDC can’t land significant supplies for the rebels, but the government can’t get anything past the blockade.
“Both sides have food, bullets, and bodies…but neither side has heavy weapons or combat vehicles sufficient to push the other out of their fortified positions.”
“So, your girlfriend is actually backing the legitimate government for once,” Kelly said.
“Darius is a mess, and the whole UnArcana versus open system layer to the conflict makes Protectorate interference…even messier,” he admitted. “We’re running this cargo to a rendezvous with Seule. His ship can dance circles around the corporate mercs in the system—especially if we provide a distraction.”
Her Captain shook his head.
“It’d be a favor for a favor, in exchange for the help tracking back the cargo at Ardennes, and well…it sounds like the folks on Darius need a break.”
Kelly nodded slowly.
“I’ll pull what data we have on SDC,” she promised. “We may be able to pull some tricks with their systems, depending on how good their gear is.”
“We can’t use MISS tricks for this,” Rice warned. “Mars cannot be seen to be involved here.”
She grinned at him.
“If they’re corporate mercs, Captain, I won’t need MISS’s tricks.”
14
Maria ran through the numbers for the course one last time and leaned back in her office with a sigh. The AE-237 system was an empty hunk of space no one had ever bothered to name, without enough objects visible from the nearby systems to warrant anyone even sending a scout ship.
That meant there were no charts for where it was safe to jump into the system. She wasn’t quite guessing on her last two jumps toward the lonely star, but the lightspeed delay meant that the data she was working with was years old.
She’d revise as they got closer and Red Falcon was able to get data that was, at least, only a year old. As trouble went, though, she’d take it. Especially compared to, say, having an ex-boyfriend aboard the ship who would turn out to be a traitor working for the people hunting Captain Rice.
Maria was alone in the office sanctum of the ship’s Mages for the moment, having sent her subordinates off to enjoy Heinlein Station’s amenities while she worked on the course to the system no one knew they were heading to.
There was a time she’d have joined them. Right now, she mostly just felt tired. The covert nature of their work now added to the already-mountainous difficulties of maintaining a relationship with someone off ship.
Her last non-disastrous relationship had been before she’d even left the Navy. Since then, they either hadn’t qualified as relationships, had fallen apart quickly under the pressure of Falcon’s semi-random schedule or, well, been traitors who tried to kill everyone.
“Are you moping around again?” James Kellers’s familiar voice echoed into her office, and she looked up in surprise.
“Chief,” she greeted him. “My moping is supposed to be a private activity. What’s up?”
“I’m hiding from my homeworld and waiting for a cargo of guns to be loaded up for an arguably illegal shipment,” Kellers agreed cheerfully, his teeth flashing bright white against his dark skin. “You?”
“Plotting a course to a system that has no records whatsoever,” she told him. “If anyone has been to this hole in space, they didn’t tell anyone.”
“And neither will we, as I understand it,” the engineer agreed. “How’s the moping?”
She snorted.
“Six months since I had a lover without batteries,” Maria told him. “I don’t think I’d ever gone that long without at least swinging through a dockside bar.”
“Why haven’t you?” Kellers asked softly. “It’s not like Heinlein doesn’t have a collection of those. Or even paid escorts with nondisclosure agreements, if you’re feeling paranoid.”
Maria laughed.
“I have no idea, honestly,” she admitted. “Just hasn’t been appealing. I must be getting old.”
Kellers arched an eyebrow at her, the shaven-headed engineer eyeing her questioningly.
“You’re a long way from old, Mage Soprano,” he told her. “I’ve got what, six years on you?”
“Service ages us all,” she replied. “First the Navy, now MISS. Who knows how much longer we can keep going?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “We do what we can, Mage Soprano.”
She laughed at him.
“James, we’ve served on this ship together for two damn years,” she told him. “You can call me Maria.”
“Fair enough,” Kellers allowed. “Now, I don’t know much about brooding and moping, but my understanding is that you do speak Spanish?”
Agents of Mars (Starship's Mage: Red Falcon Book 3) Page 8
