“I appreciate that,” Maria replied. “When their engines go down, flip to line up with the nearest jump-clear zone and burn hard.”
“Will it be that obvious?” Jeeves asked.
Both Maria and Rice looked at him for several seconds.
“He’s about to fake a critical engine failure on an antimatter rocket,” Rice pointed out. “Even if they do everything right, that’s going to be—”
A brilliant flash of white light blazed across their sensors like a newborn sun.
“Please tell me they’re still here,” the Captain said grimly, his hands already flying across his console.
“They’re still here,” Maria confirmed instantly, her own access to the sensors sufficient for that. “Mmm. Mage-Commander Abel may dislike spies, but it looks like his engineer would make a good one. They rotated the ship so no one except us could see what they did, and then ejected an entire engine assembly.
“It’ll look bad even when they limp into Amber orbit for repairs, but they should be fine.”
“And us?” Jeeves asked.
“Jump in two hours, fifteen minutes,” Maria confirmed. “We’re flashing our ass to the entire star system…so everyone knows we ran from the law.”
“Hopefully, it was worth it,” Rice agreed. “Because while that rep is going to help, I’m more than a bit concerned about how the Navy is going to feel about it.”
16
In David’s opinion, Maria Soprano was solidly the second-best Jump Mage he’d ever commanded. Given that his best had transformed a jump matrix into a combat amplifier and turned out to be some strange kind of super-Mage, that was a pretty high recommendation.
She jumped them into the AE-237 System with precision and calm, even though David knew that they didn’t have anything resembling detailed charts of the system.
“We’re in,” she announced. “No problems.”
“Well done,” David told her. “Guns? Sweep the system, every sensor we’ve got. Let’s see if we can dial in enough of the junk while we’re here to make our next trip safer.”
“We can hope there’s never another trip, right?” LaMonte asked from the navigation console. “This place is going to be a nightmare to navigate, and there’s nothing here worth making the attempt.”
AE-237 was a brown dwarf about ten million years post the supernova of its distant binary partner. Any planets or significant asteroids had been consumed in the supernova, leaving behind radiation fields that made sensors unreliable and debris patterns that made flying in a straight line hazardous.
There was nothing big enough to make a decent anchor for a mining operation—and any such operation would have looked more like a giant vacuum than a drill. There was little in the debris that was left to be worth visiting the star system, too. Mostly ice and other material that had vaporized and been flung outward by the supernova, only to be caught by AE-237’s gravity field and coalesce into new debris as the nova dispersed.
David’s understanding suggested that there should be some exotic materials and such in the debris fields, but no one was willing to go through ten million tons of ice and carbon to find fifty grams of uranium. Not when they had to travel to a different star system to do it.
“Well, somewhere out there is our rendezvous and our mission,” he reminded his staff. “Keep an eye out for other ships, Jeeves. Luciole is supposed to be here somewhere, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t anyone else.”
“Why the hell would there be anyone else here?” LaMonte asked.
“Well, not least because we are,” David told her. “And someone already sold us out to the Navy. Plus, anyone here saw our jump flare.”
“Right,” she conceded. “I’ll set up some first-pass analysis on the sensor data, see if I can at least try and narrow down where ships aren’t.”
“I’d like to pick up Luciole before we start spamming the recognition signal,” he continued. “I know Seule is a sneaky bugger, so we may have to start transmitting blindly, but I’d rather avoid it if we can.”
Half an hour later, David was beginning to sympathize with whoever had decided that AE-237 wasn’t worth visiting. Where they could manage to penetrate the radiation fog, all they could see was debris. The entire system was just…soup.
“Well, the good news is that I can point out a whole half of the system where there aren’t starships,” LaMonte said drily. “The bad news is that only leaves, oh, a five-AU-radius sphere in which someone could have hidden a fleet. Or six.”
“I don’t suppose anyone is transmitting ‘hello, world’ out of that storm?” he asked.
“Nothing,” his XO replied. “We can pulse the entire segment, though it will be hours until we get a response if Luciole is on the other side of the system.”
David sighed.
“We were given slightly more detail than ‘the AE-237 System,’” he pointed out. “He should be somewhere in this quadrant. Send the recognition code.”
A radio transmission powerful enough to reach ten astronomical units—eighty-three light-minutes, give or take—would melt the paint on anything close to Red Falcon. The ex-Navy ship had the transmitters to send it, but they were going to be a beacon for the entire star system.
“Then take us to battle stations,” David ordered after a moment’s thought. “Get the full defensive suite up and load the launchers. This system makes me itch.”
Alerts began to ring through the freighter’s hull, and sections began to light up in different colors on the repeater screens on David’s command chair. The Rapid-Fire Laser Anti-Missile turrets were almost entirely automated and came online first. Then the capacitors for the battle lasers started flashing yellow as the crews arrived and began charging their weapons.
Red Falcon wasn’t a warship—there were emergency options built into her to dump her cargo and turn her into a pocket warship, but those weren’t reversable. Nonetheless, she was a covert ops ship, and her crew drilled on her weapons and defenses regularly.
The three and a half minutes it took to get the ship to battle stations wouldn’t have pleased the captains of the Navy ships David had served on—but it wouldn’t have embarrassed them, either.
“Any response yet?” he asked LaMonte.
“Not yet.”
“Jeeves?” David continued.
“We’ve gone fully active on the sensors,” the other ex-Navy man replied. “There is nothing within three million kilometers of us. Ninety-five percent certain we’re clear to six million kilometers. Eighty percent certain to twelve.”
Jeeves paused.
“All launchers are loaded; all lasers are fully charged. Anyone who decides our message is an invitation to jump us is going to have an ugly surprise waiting.”
“Response code!” LaMonte interrupted. “And I have a fix. We have Luciole’s recognition signal at four light-minutes.” She shook her head. “Jeeves, I’m not getting a clear read on her. What do you see?”
“Looks like he’s hiding in one of the denser debris clouds. We can maneuver to intercept, but—”
“Four light-minutes is a long way,” Soprano interrupted. “Xi Wu is up and Nguyen is fully rested. We can jump to Luciole, or at least jump much closer to her, and still be ready to jump clear of the system if something overwhelming happens.”
“XO?” David asked.
LaMonte shrugged.
“Fifteen hours if we fly it. Ten and a half if Luciole comes to meet us and also pulls ten gees. If we can jump it, it’ll save us all a lot of headache.”
“I agree,” David said. “Maintain battle stations. Ship’s Mage—you may jump us whenever you’re ready.”
There was the always indescribable moment of discomfort as reality tore and Red Falcon was suddenly there instead of here. The screens updated around David, sensors and computers rapidly collating data to confirm where the armed freighter was now.
“Confirmed, Luciole is now two million kilometers away,” Jeeves reported. “Establishing direct tightbe
am link.”
Two million kilometers was still a thirteen-second two-way communication delay, but you could only get so much accuracy out of an in-system jump. David’s people had just moved his ship seventy-plus million kilometers in the blink of an eye.
He wasn’t complaining.
“Luciole, this is Captain David Rice aboard Red Falcon. We have a few crates full of presents for you and your client.”
David waited. A video link opened thirteen seconds later, and the familiar dark-haired, grinning visage of Nathan Seule appeared on his screen. The last few years had aged the smuggler, but his hair was still black and his skin was still tanned.
“Captain Rice, it’s been a long time! Last time we met, I was the only one rich enough to burn antimatter. I see the years have been kinder to you than we would have guessed back then.”
David returned the grin and inclined his head.
“It’s good to see that you escaped the consequences of helping us, Captain Seule,” he told the smuggler. “Is this channel secure?”
Seconds ticked away, but David could tell when Seule received his question, as the other man checked his own consoles.
Both of them were running camera feeds focused specifically on them. Seule couldn’t see Red Falcon’s bridge and David couldn’t see Luciole’s. It was a minor security measure, probably pointless at this juncture, but the habit served them well.
“Looks like we’ve both got each other locked up with nice, tight beams,” Seule finally confirmed. “I’m not seeing any leakage, which means we can be pretty frank. I’ve got an update on the blockade at Darius and it doesn’t look pretty. I’m wondering if I can impose on you for a favor.”
“I’ve a favor I need to ask you as well,” David admitted. “But there’s limits on what I can do, Captain. Red Falcon may be better armed than most corporate merc ships, but I’m not picking a fight for the Darian government.”
Thirteen seconds later, Seule laughed.
“I wouldn’t expect you to. We’ll discuss once we’ve made rendezvous. May I invite you and your new Ship’s Mage to join me for dinner aboard Luciole? Our fixtures and meals may not be up to Navy standards anymore, but I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
Like Red Falcon, Luciole had been born as a Navy auxiliary. She’d been a smaller version of the AAFHF program, a Rapid Deployment Collier. Several of her sisters still served in the Navy, unlike Falcon’s, but the RDCs had also proven extremely effective as blockade runners.
Luciole had been in Seule’s hands for far longer than Falcon had been in David’s. He doubted much of the ship’s interior still resembled her Navy days.
Nonetheless, his curiosity was piqued—and he needed to ask some questions of Seule that it was better no one else knew about.
“Mage Soprano and I would be delighted, Captain Seule.”
17
Kelly couldn’t help but feel ambivalent as the shuttle carrying her boyfriend and her bosses took off for the much-smaller ship drifting a few dozen kilometers from Red Falcon’s bow. On the one hand, AE-237 was as dead and abandoned as anywhere in space. On the other, it was also one of the messiest places she’d ever had the misfortune of trying to find anything in—and with Rice and Soprano aboard Luciole, Kelly LaMonte was in command of Red Falcon.
“Let’s take the ship down to Alert Bravo,” she told Jeeves after the shuttle was clear. “Battle stations doesn’t seem necessary, but I don’t want to stand everyone down just yet.”
Alert Bravo held a minimum crew on the weapon mounts and kept the capacitors and launchers loaded. It would cycle one-third of the crew through rest breaks at a time, while keeping the rest ready to get into a fight.
Even a Navy crew couldn’t sustain Alert Bravo forever, and for all of their secrets and tricks, most of Red Falcon’s crew remained fundamentally civilian.
“Got that itch between your shoulder blades too, huh?” the gunnery officer asked as he tapped commands to change the alert codes on the system. “Captain’s running off for tea, and we’re drifting out here with our ass bare naked to the stellar breeze.”
“I think the Captain is feeling it too,” Kelly told him. “Otherwise, we’d already be transferring cargo.”
Luciole could only handle a tenth of Red Falcon’s current cargo, a twentieth of the big ship’s full capacity. With the two vessels’ combined shuttle fleets, they could load her in a few hours. They’d have to decide what to do with the other nine million tons of cargo.
Kelly’s assumption was that they were dropping it in a stable orbit somewhere for Luciole to finish the job, but that was up to the Captain. She’d recommend against leaving it here, but they could make a couple of jumps towards Darius and leave the cargo a light-year or two away from its final destination.
“Do you see that chunk of fog?” she asked Jeeves as she studied her screens. A chunk of even denser radioactive debris was about seven million kilometers away but drifting directly toward them.
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “Can I say, XO, that I fucking hate this star system?”
She chuckled.
“I agree completely. That cloud is moving fast. Can we pulse it directly?” she asked.
“Too far away to get anything really useful from it,” Jeeves admitted. “Strange that Luciole’s crew didn’t mention it; you’d think it was a local hazard.”
“Not really,” Kelly said. “Eight million kilometers is a long way. It’s moving fast for a rad cloud, but it’s still hours away. We’ll be done before it’s a problem. Assuming it isn’t hiding something.”
“I could drop a missile into it from here,” the older man offered. “Straight kinetic shouldn’t do much to the cloud, but we’ve got some nukes. Even some of the Navy’s big anti-missile MIV swarms.”
The Multiple Independent Vehicle system was a countermeasure the Royal Martian Navy had developed for its ships that didn’t carry heavy RFLAM armaments—ships like Luciole. It launched in a standard missile but had far less fuel.
Instead, it blew apart relatively quickly after launch, spreading out a wall of nuclear submunitions that detonated on proximity. They were designed to wipe out entire missile salvos.
“We have, what, six of those?” she asked. “Let’s not waste them on an itch. It’s not like they’d get there in less than an hour, either.”
Kelly studied the approaching radioactive cloud and then looked at the rest of the system. It wasn’t unusual, but it was the closest to them and moving directly their way. It was natural enough, she was sure…but it was still suspicious.
“Pulse it with our full sensor suite,” she ordered. “We may not get anything…but if someone is using it as a screen, we can spook ’em.”
“And if we do?” Jeeves asked quietly.
“This is the back end of nowhere, Guns. If they don’t back off when we tell them to, we do whatever it takes to defend ourselves and our business partner.”
They’d worked together before, but David had never set foot aboard Seule’s ship. Even his pilots hadn’t, as they’d simply hauled cargo containers over to the blockade runner.
He wasn’t expecting it to be a horror show, but he was still somewhat surprised to exit his shuttle into an operating flight bay with artificial gravity. Silver runes glittered over the floor and the air smelled fresh and clean, despite the fact that a shuttle just landed.
Nathan Seule was shorter in person than he’d expected, but the smuggler was right there, offering his hand as David and Soprano left their shuttle.
“Welcome aboard Luciole, Captain Rice, Mage Soprano. May I introduce Les Camber, my senior Ship’s Mage?”
Les Camber was a gauntly pale man who towered over everyone in the room, his golden medallion a sign of his authority even as he bestowed a faint smile on everyone.
“Technically, Captain Seule is the senior Ship’s Mage himself,” Camber noted in a hoarse voice. “I simply administer our juniors while he runs the ship.”
David turned his attentio
n back to Seule. The smuggler wasn’t wearing the medallion that marked a Mage, but that didn’t mean much. Tradition and habit were one thing; survival in a world where some systems banned Mages was another.
“Mage Camber gives himself too little credit,” Seule said promptly. “Yes, I am a Mage, but I’ve never been an overly good one. I can jump a ship, that’s all. No point advertising that fact, eh, Captain Rice?”
And yet somehow Rice was very sure that Camber wouldn’t have dropped that tidbit without his Captain’s permission. Seule was playing a dangerous game here, testing to see just how far he could trust David and his crew.
“You have multiple Mages aboard?” he asked instead. “I find most merchant ships underestimate the advantages of that.”
“I don’t think it’s so much they underestimate the advantages as they balk at the cost,” Camber replied. “I have two junior Ship’s Mages who report to me, which allows us to move between systems as swiftly as we can move within them.”
“An advantage I’m sure you’ve realized yourself,” Seule concluded. “Come with me. We can save conversation for while we’re eating, in privacy.”
David nodded to himself and shared a knowing glance with Soprano.
He doubted his Mage was any more sure of what game Seule was playing than he was…but they were both very sure he was playing a longer game than he was admitting.
As Seule led them deeper into the ship, David noted just how much the interior of the ship had been redone since Luciole had left Martian service. The gravity runes were standard in the RMN—but the thickly padded carpet Luciole’s runes were embedded in was not.
The faint whirring of a cleaning robot following them down the hallway explained how Seule and his people kept the ship clean.
The other thing David noticed was the complete lack of crew other than Seule and Camber.
“Your crew seems notably absent,” he murmured to the other Captain.
Agents of Mars (Starship's Mage: Red Falcon Book 3) Page 10
