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

by Glynn Stewart

  “Mr. Jeeves?” Kelly said softly.

  “Firing,” he confirmed. “How hard are we pushing this, ma’am?”

  “Stick with Rapiers but go to maximum cycle,” she ordered. “Keep the RFLAMs online and include Luciole in our coverage. This ‘Manager’ may look down her nose at me, but she doesn’t get to shoot my friends!”

  Red Falcon trembled as her missile launchers spoke. Ten Rapier IV fusion-drive missiles, purely kinetic weapons in this case, blasted free and began to close.

  “Any action from the monitor?” Kelly asked.

  “She’s cut acceleration and is letting the SDC ships get ahead of her,” Jeeves reported. “I don’t think the Bears are being paid enough for this fight.”

  That was something.

  “Luciole is launching,” Jeeves continued a moment later. “Apparently, Seule is feeling spendy. Those are antimatter missiles: Phoenix VIs. He’s going to hit them a good minute and a half before any of our missiles get into play—a full minute before the SDC salvo reaches us.”

  “Going to be an interesting moment of truth,” Kelly murmured as her ship shivered again. “Did I piss Manager Ferro off enough that she’s shooting at us…or is she shooting past us and try to hit Luciole?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Jeeves allowed.

  The minimum flight for the missiles was almost five minutes. By the time even Luciole’s missiles had reached the enemy’s defensive perimeter, Red Falcon had launched eight full salvos of missiles.

  Control at over twenty light-seconds was…limited. The missiles were only so smart, and the defensive plans Red Falcon had in place relied on that. Kelly hadn’t met many programmers as good as her, and she’d repeatedly reworked the armed freighter’s electronic defenses.

  “Luciole is sequencing her later salvos to arrive with ours,” Jeeves told her. “They’ll be higher-velocity, but the SDC will have to deal with both salvos.”

  Kelly could see part of why Seule was only playing with antimatter birds. His blockade runner only had four missile launchers, which made her the smallest contributor to the massed tsunamis starting to lunge between the fragile-seeming ships.

  “SDC ships engaging. Oof.” Jeeves shook his head. “Well, this is going to be short.”

  “Jeeves?” Kelly demanded.

  “I don’t know what they’re packing for offensive beams, but they’re only got four RFLAM turrets apiece,” he replied. “They are fucked.”

  Luciole’s first four missiles drove home the gunnery officer’s point. They should never have stood a chance, but one got close enough to explode directly in the face of the nearest ship. The radiation hash washed over the corporate ships, making a mess of their sensors in a way no non-antimatter warhead ever could.

  “All we need to do is handle six times as many missiles with only twice as many turrets,” Kelly pointed out. “Let’s not start cheering just yet.”

  Even as she spoke, she was triggering several of the programs she’d previously coded into Falcon’s systems, turning her massive sensor array to purposes for which it had never been designed.

  The big freighter had an electronic-warfare suite, but it had never fully lived up to Kelly’s needs. Now the sensors and communications arrays awoke as well, slaved to the new code. She didn’t need long-range sensors to fight missiles—they’d be useful, sure, but they’d be more useful in her current setting.

  An overwhelming wave of jamming swept out from Falcon, blinding the missiles’ sensors with garbage as they tried to seek out their targets. The momentary confusion as the computers tried to adapt manifested in seconds of straight-line flight.

  And seconds were all Jeeves’s team running the anti-missile turrets needed. Half of the missiles vanished in a handful of moments, but the rest adjusted for the jamming and charged forward. Several of the remainder died to the laser fire even with their maneuvers, but Kelly wasn’t done with them yet.

  She picked the closest missile and hit it with every transmitter Red Falcon had. It wasn’t, quite, powerful enough to be called a maser, but it was strong enough to completely burn out the lead missile’s scanners. Blind and deaf, safety protocols hard-coded into the weapon triggered a self-destruct.

  It was far less efficient a defense than the RFLAM turrets, but it was one extra missile they didn’t have to kill. The others didn’t get off unscathed from the massive blast wave of radiation, either. Their sensors confused, their poor computers completely overwhelmed by stimuli the teams sending them into space hadn’t predicted, they never stood a chance.

  “All right,” Kelly breathed aloud as the last missile died. “That is not going to work a second time. I’ve got several more rounds of tricks, but the next time is going to be harder.”

  Jeeves grunted, his own attention focused on his screen as their first salvo went in. Ten missiles against four ships was a losing proposition, even if the CorpSec corvettes were under-equipped with defenses, but they could still…

  “Got one!” he announced. “All right, so the designers weren’t complete idiots,” he continued. “One solid hit on Bogey Three, but she’s still with us. That’s damn effective armor.”

  “Once we start stacking salvos, our birds will cover Luciole’s,” Kelly said. “I don’t care what they hung on them—they don’t have the armor to stop antimatter missiles packed into a five-hundred-k-ton ship.”

  Ferro didn’t appear to be enjoying the discovery of how vulnerable her ships were. Kelly suspected that the concept of someone shooting back hadn’t shown up in their corporate planning meetings.

  Unfortunately, neither had the concept of surrender. Her ships were adjusting their formation, spreading out and rotating to clear their firing lines and provide harder targets for the incoming salvos.

  It wasn’t enough. The second combined salvo from Luciole and Red Falcon arrived before the second SDC salvo reached Red Falcon. If Kelly had been in Ferro’s place, she’d have been planning some blistering conversations with their suppliers and designers.

  Of course, if Kelly had been in Ferro’s place, she’d have been running for the hills. Ferro clearly had different plans, and Falcon’s XO suspected she knew what they were.

  “Let me know if that monitor even twitches,” she ordered as she watched the missiles charge home. The SDC ships had learned a lot from the first salvo—and someone clever had been watching what she did as well. Pulses of jamming strobed across the incoming weapons, and several of the Rapier IVs disappeared in moments of confusion.

  The Phoenixes, however, were far smarter—and Kelly had had her fingers in the code of Falcon’s missiles. So, for that matter, had James Keller. While even he would admit Kelly had surpassed him as a programmer, he’d taught her most of what she’d started with.

  Two fusion missiles made it through, sending the lead corvette reeling out of the rough formation as her engines flickered and atmosphere vented from gaping holes in her hull.

  She was the lucky one. Seule had targeted his missiles with a practiced forethought. The farthest ship in the formation was not quite hiding behind the others, but she was definitely the most defended.

  Seule had clearly figured that was Ferro’s command ship and sent his entire salvo after it. The extra distance meant only two missiles made it through, even with the cover from Falcon’s salvo.

  Two antimatter missiles, closing at almost ten percent of lightspeed and carrying gigaton-range warheads, were more than any privately-built paramilitary ship in the galaxy could survive. The fourth heavy corvette disappeared as the paired explosions vaporized perfect spheres of hull and systems.

  “Um. So, the monitor twitched,” Jeeves reported in the quiet. “She twitched right the hell out of here—she just jumped.”

  The damaged SDC corvette had clearly reached the same conclusion as the mercenary ship, and suddenly there were only two vessels facing them.

  “Focus on the incoming,” Kelly snapped. “Let’s get out of this alive.”

  Two sh
ips could still control all of the missiles in play, and over two hundred missiles were still heading their way.

  “Watch it!” Jeeves suddenly barked at Sarah-Beth Vong, but the pilot had already seen it. Red Falcon dove sideways as Luciole shifted her course, slipping “above” the big freighter and launching a single pair of missiles.

  Kelly had seen Seule do this before and swallowed a chuckle.

  “Let me guess,” she said to Jeeves. “Anti-missile MIVs?”

  “Got it,” he confirmed in surprise, moments before the two weapons broke apart. Submunitions sprayed across space in front of the incoming salvo, and missiles began to die.

  Lasers flared in space and nuclear warheads detonated and the incoming fire withered like ice in the sun.

  “How did you know?” the gunner asked.

  “He did the same thing once before, and that time, we weren’t even expecting him to get involved,” Kelly replied. “Handy trick.”

  She studied the screens.

  “There they go,” she noted as both remaining ships disappeared. “Smart move, once they realized how badly outclassed they were.”

  “There’s still two hundred missiles out there,” Jeeves pointed out.

  “Without someone to override them in flight? Those aren’t a problem. Give me a minute.”

  They had MISS override codes for the Rapier III, but Kelly didn’t think she trusted Nathan Seule and his people that far.

  Not when the Rapier III-B was at best a third-tier weapon with second-class hardware and obsolete software. She had enough data to break the access codes in under thirty seconds.

  It wouldn’t have worked with newer weapons and it wouldn’t have worked with any of the launching ships still in the system, but as it was…

  Every remaining missile detonated its nuclear warhead simultaneously, lighting up the star system in a glorious display of horrendously expensive fireworks.

  19

  David and Soprano weren’t much help during the fight, he had to admit. Luciole had the same style of bridge as most true warships, with the bridge consoles and command seating installed in mixed layers throughout the simulacrum chamber.

  Seule sat in the center of the bridge, his hands on the floating silver simulacrum of Luciole as he barked orders and the three-person bridge crew around him leapt to obey. David and Soprano simply waited out of the way while the smuggler crew went to work.

  It allowed him to watch his own ship in action, and he was impressed. He knew Kelly LaMonte and Alexander Jeeves were good, but watching them in action without him made him feel more than a little redundant.

  When the dust settled, he found himself at least mildly humbled. His subordinates had handled the fight better than he might have been able to. He needed to seriously give some thought around the idea of working to get LaMonte her own command.

  Potentially, all things considered, through MISS rather than private ownership. Her skills would be wasted running a merchant ship, but a covert ops ship like Red Falcon—or perhaps something even more quiet and black—would serve her well.

  “Your new ship is a significant upgrade over your old one,” Seule said calmly as the missiles erupted in their fireworks display. “But I’m still pretty sure that’s not standard.”

  “That would be my XO,” David replied. “She has a way with computers that I’m not entirely sure is moral or correct in any way.”

  The smuggler snorted.

  “I know the type,” he admitted. “Does she want a job?”

  “I doubt it,” David said with a grin, despite his own thoughts with regards to LaMonte’s necessary advancement. “If nothing else, you seem to already have a competent XO.”

  The black woman at the tactical console glared at him in silence, which he took as at least some measure of agreement.

  “That is fair. I appreciate your assistance,” Seule said finally. “This Ferro definitely knew what I had; those four corvettes would have made hash of just Luciole.”

  David had been watching the data during the fight, and he shook his head.

  “They’re warships designed by civilian committee,” he pointed out. “Over-gunned, over-engined, over-armored, but under-protected, and I’d bet money they’re short on redundancy, too.”

  “And they still had twenty-four launchers to my four,” the smuggler replied. “My people are good, but that’s a hell of a weight differential. Thanks to you, it seems we have settled the immediate threat.”

  “So, shall we talk about those favors we want from each other?” David asked with a grin.

  Seule laughed.

  “In my office, Captain Rice. I’ll go dig up the nice booze after this.”

  Seule’s office was as much of a contrast to the rest of the ship as the ship had been a contrast to her original interior. Where whoever had redesigned the rest of the ship had been very clearly intended to make her a home, this room had been rebuilt into a tactician’s dream working space.

  In the original design, the captain’s office had a single wall screen, a desk, and a console. The desk and console were gone now, the metal floor covered in some strange wood-like material that was soft and giving under David’s feet.

  All four walls had been converted to screens. Part of one slid aside to disgorge two extra chairs at a wave of Seule’s hand, immediately closing again to return to an image that resembled nothing so much as a miniature version of the simulacrum chamber.

  The smuggler captain took his seat and opened a wooden cabinet to produce three small glasses. He poured a generous dollop of amber liquid into each tumbler and passed them over.

  “To old friends coming through unexpectedly,” he told them. “I didn’t expect the SDC to be able to follow me. The Hunter going after you was the last Tracker I’d met.”

  “We knew the Golden Bears had one, and they are for hire,” David admitted. “I would have expected SDC to pick up Aristos’s entire little fleet though.”

  Jason Aristos commanded the Golden Bears and remained one of the most well-known mercenaries in the Protectorate. He seemed to have mostly learned his lesson about taking black bounties, too, since David had handed the man’s fleet back to him in pieces when they’d clashed.

  “I don’t know if they could fit him in their project budget,” Seule said. “Renting fleets shows up as an expense, after all. Paramilitary corporate security fleets are an asset on the balance sheet.”

  He snorted, and slugged back half of the liquor. David sipped more cautiously himself, the smoothly fierce flavor justifying that.

  “I didn’t think Amber fire liqueur was supposed to leave the system,” he observed as he let the peppery heat run down his throat. The liquor was banned in a good chunk of the Protectorate, due to being significantly higher-proof than generally regarded as safe…and not tasting like it at all.

  “I stop in Amber enough to keep a stock,” Seule told him. “Look, Captain, Mage. You’re already deep in this now. SDC is not going to let the fact you blew one of their ships away slide.”

  “We didn’t,” Soprano pointed out. “You did. We rang a few bells, but it was your missiles that destroyed Ferro’s flagship.”

  “Yeah.” The smuggler drained his glass. “I’m going to pay for that, but merde, was it nice to put an explosive fist into one of those arrogant assholes’ faces. ‘Flotilla Manager,’ mon cul.”

  “So, how do you plan on dealing with their fleet?” David asked. “For that matter, how were you planning on dealing with them? We have ten full cargos for Luciole aboard Falcon.”

  “Yeah, and one of them is a stash of surface-to-orbit weapons sufficient to at least make the SDC mercs blink,” Seule explained. “The plan, originally, was to have you bring the cargo to a jump or so away from Darius, and I’d make my first run with those.

  “Once we’d landed the STO missiles, they’d be able to open a large-enough window above the spaceport for me to dance my way into.”

  “How were you going to manage that?” Soprano
asked, her voice sounding surprised to David.

  “Luciole was designed by a bloody committee to do a lot of different things,” the smuggler replied. “One of those was to be the biggest damn headache the Royal Martian Marine Corps ever gave anybody. The reason the Navy still has any of them in service is because the Corps doesn’t want to give them up until they get a lot more assault transports in commission.”

  He grinned.

  “Luciole can land and lift off again,” he told them. “We can’t lift off with a cargo, but I can land with one and lift off empty. So, we drop onto the spaceport, deliver the missiles, and pop back up.”

  “And now there’s far too many ships for that to be an option,” David guessed.

  “Even if I deliver all of the missiles, I’m not sure they can open a wide-enough hole for me to sneak Luciole into,” Seule confirmed. “When we were expecting half a dozen ships, it was one thing. A frigging fleet, though…”

  “Isn’t that just a lost cause, then?” David asked.

  “With just Luciole, yes.”

  “And with us?”

  Seule grinned wickedly.

  “Two ships and a whole lot of far-too-clever people? They’re never going to know what hit them.”

  David shook his head once the smuggler finished describing his plan.

  “Audacious, and asking a lot of our Mages,” he said. “Maria? Can we do it?”

  The dark-skinned Mage looked thoughtful.

  “It won’t be easy,” she told them. “I wouldn’t risk it with any other crew of Mages, but I think my people can do it.”

  “I know mine can do it with Luciole,” Seule replied. “But she’s a much smaller ship.”

  “We’ll consider it,” David said, carefully not making any promises. “Though that brings us to: what do we get out of this? I owe you for saving our lives, but taking my crew up against an entire fleet seems a bit much in payment for that.”

  The other man tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair.