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

by Glynn Stewart

  “You sought me out for a reason, Captain Rice,” he said, echoing his earlier comments before the SDC had shown up. “I don’t know what that reason is, but it was enough for a man the Martian Navy feels indebted to to break the law again. This office is secure, even against my own people, trust them as I do.

  “What is it you want?”

  “Ardennes,” David said flatly. “You delivered attack helicopters, among other things, to the Freedom Wing. I need to know who paid for them and where they came from.”

  Seule didn’t even seem surprised.

  “That one was always a touch odd,” he admitted. “Middlemen are one thing, but the whole situation smelled off.”

  “So, explain it to me,” David said.

  “Uh-uh.” Seule wagged a finger at him. “You help me make this delivery to the poor bastards trying to hold Darius together, and I will tell you everything I know.”

  “And if it isn’t actually what I want or need to know?” David asked.

  “That’s the risk you take,” the smuggler replied. “You’re buying what I know, Captain Rice, I make no guarantees as to its value. I can’t. I don’t know what you’re after. I don’t know—nor do I want to know—who you work for.”

  “Maybe not,” the stocky freighter captain turned spy retorted. “But you do know that Alaura Stealey is dead, right?”

  Seule froze in the middle of beginning to respond.

  “The Hand?” he finally asked.

  “Yes. I understand that you met her,” David said.

  “I sent her after you,” the smuggler admitted. “Saved your life a second time, as I understand. The only Hand I ever met, left me with a better impression of the group that I expected. Dead?” He paused. “Did the Freedom Wing kill her?”

  “Rather the opposite. Vaughn killed her. The Freedom Wing got coopted by another Hand to take him down. But there are too many cooks in these damn kitchens, Captain Seule, and I think what you know will lead to one of the ones with a damn long spoon.”

  Seule laughed.

  “That is one tortured metaphor, Captain Rice, but I get your meaning,” he agreed. “I think what I know will help you, but here’s a piece for free that will make you think:

  “The Freedom Wing thought they were buying the gear from me at a discount, but what they paid me was barely half of what I was paid for the run. The Wing thought it was a charity cargo…but I was specifically hired to deliver that cargo.

  “And those helicopters were paid for in full before they ever reached me, let alone Ardennes.”

  20

  “I have to admit, I think I enjoy being a passenger during a battle even less when it’s aboard a strange ship,” Mike Kelzin griped as Red Falcon’s officers gathered in a small meeting room.

  “You get used to it,” Kellers pointed out. “But at least aboard your own ship, you can trust the crew and you have at least something to do.”

  The First Pilot grunted, trading a look with LaMonte that said part of his concern had been for his girlfriends. David swallowed a laugh at the—relatively tame, all things considered—antics of the youngest two of his senior officers.

  “We survived,” David reminded his people. “And with no real losses or damage. We got damn lucky.”

  “Their ships suck,” Jeeves said. “All flash and bang, but no staying power.”

  “The monitor was a different story,” LaMonte objected. “We’ve fought the Bears’ ships before. If her captain had decided to get involved, we would have had a much worse day.”

  “Fortunately, either she was under orders from Aristos not to engage or Ferro couldn’t meet her price,” Soprano noted. “Either way, Aristos doesn’t currently have more reasons to come after us for blood—but the Stellarites now have us marked.”

  “Fuck ’em,” Leonhart said harshly, the Marine security chief looking entirely unsympathetic for the corporate security force they’d faced. “They mess with the viper, they get the fangs.”

  “We met four of their heavies today,” David said quietly. “They have more of those. And two dozen smaller ships. Their blockade has enough of a legal fig leaf to keep the Protectorate from getting officially involved, or a single destroyer squadron would have already ended it.

  “Which means that I’m not flashing a shiny badge around and ordering people to go home—but we can’t fight their little fleet, either, which leaves us with Seule’s plan.”

  The room was silent.

  “Do you trust him?” Leonhart finally demanded. “I know most of this crew’s been on both sides of the law, and we certainly have been gun smugglers for a while now, but he’s been doing this for years. How can we trust him?”

  “We can’t,” David admitted. “I believe in his convictions and that he is honestly trying to help people, but his is a toxic path. You can’t walk it without getting poisoned—it’s something we all need to watch in ourselves.

  “That said, his plan is…audacious and unexpected. I don’t think SDC will see it coming. Almost as important, in my book, is that it will let us pull off our mission without having to kill anyone. We can hope that once the Darian government is in possession of enough weaponry to end their damn war, the rebels will concede.”

  “You know it’s never that simple,” Soprano warned him.

  “I said I can hope,” David admitted. “I don’t expect that to be the case, but SDC’s legal fig leaf depends on the pretense that the government that the election kicked out is still somehow legitimate. Once they’ve surrendered or been captured, that legal fig leaf dissolves. Then they either get the hell out of dodge, or the Navy breaks the blockade.

  “Our cargo will end their damn war, so long as we can get it through the blockade.” He shook his head. “I won’t pretend that’s valueless, but it also gets us what we need.”

  “What if Seule doesn’t talk after we’ve fought his war for him?” Leonhart asked. “He’s a crook. A liar. He could be playing us.”

  “He could be,” David conceded. “I don’t think so, but he could be. The thing to remember, though, is that the Protectorate is quite aware of Nathan Seule and his activities and has, in the main, classified him as a low threat. There are other, much less principled gunrunners out there.

  “If he screws us over, that classification shifts. I don’t think Captain Seule would enjoy suddenly finding himself higher on everyone’s priority lists…and I do think he realizes what the consequences of screwing us over would be.”

  After the rest of the officers had left, David leaned on his hands and studied Kelly LaMonte. His young XO looked exhausted.

  “So, your first battle in full command,” he said gently. “How are you holding up?”

  “I did…okay,” she concluded after a moment. “I didn’t freeze. Didn’t panic. It’s weird, though… things I’ve done, programs I’ve written…I’ve killed people before. Feels different this time.”

  “The orders were yours,” David reminded her. “The responsibility was yours. It is different.”

  LaMonte shook her head. “I guess. Wasn’t what I expected, I suppose.”

  “You were expecting to end up in command in many battles, I take it?” he asked with forced humor.

  Her chuckle was equally forced, but she was trying.

  “Not really, though we seem to end up in enough of them, for all that we’re not a warship.”

  “We put ourselves in harm’s way a lot,” David agreed. “That was the job we took on, the deal we agreed to with Stealey and MISS. We’re out here to make a difference, to try and protect other people. We aren’t necessarily doing it in a traditional fashion, with banners blazing as we ride out like knights in shining armor…but what we do is just as necessary to keep the Protectorate safe.”

  “This whole thing in Darius is nerve-wracking,” she admitted. “We know so little about the factions in play, but here we are, providing one of them with enough firepower to force the rest of their planet into line.

  “Who are we to judg
e which side is right?”

  “I don’t know,” David confessed. “I tend to err on the side of the people who didn’t start the violence, as a rule, and against the people working for Legatus. That’s my own biases speaking, but…in the end, we’re agents of Mars. The Mage-King wants us to consider the general good as well, but we exist to serve his interests at least on an equal level.”

  “So, we fight for the Mages regardless of whether they’re in the right this time?” LaMonte asked.

  He shook his head.

  “We fight for the Mage-King and the Protectorate,” he argued. “I’ve never met him, but my impression from Stealey is that he’d often rather have the right thing done, not the thing that serves him.

  “In this case, I think that’s the same thing. One group got elected to change things, and others have used everything from violence to this orbital blockade to force things to stay the same.” He shrugged. “Their goals align with Mars’s goals, so we intervene. The truth is that we’re not here for Darius. We’re getting involved because we need Seule’s information and this is his price.”

  “So, we’d do nothing otherwise?” she demanded.

  “I suspect there are already wheels in motion in MISS to see this situation resolved,” David told her. “Certainly, I reported everything Keiko told me up the chain. Regardless of how our visit goes, I don’t think SDC is going to enjoy the consequences of getting involved.”

  Kelly LaMonte nodded slowly, studying the wallscreen showing the projected positions of the corporate fleet blocking all shipments to or from Darius.

  “I have my concerns,” she said, “but somehow, that thought doesn’t bother me at all.”

  With the meeting over, Kelly slowly made her way back to the set of double-sized quarters she shared with the ship’s second-most senior Mage and the First Pilot. Rank hath its privileges…and one of those privileges was using the XO’s salary to pay for modifications to the officers’ quarters.

  Like removing the entire wall between the XO and First Pilot’s quarters, among other changes.

  The lights in her shared quarters were turned down as she came in, and the wallscreen in the living room was lit up with a movie of some kind. Kelly wasn’t paying that much attention, presuming to leave Xi and Mike alone as she went to bed.

  She didn’t even make it three steps into the room before the movie paused and the lights brightened. Xi pulled herself up over the couch and leveled a dark-eyed gaze on the tired executive officer.

  “Hey, lover,” the Mage told her. “You look as shattered as the rest of us feel. Get over here.”

  “I didn’t want to interrupt your movie,” Kelly said quietly.

  There was a shifting noise as Mike adjusted to be visible over the couch as well. It was pretty clear that Xi was still sitting in his lap as they both looked at Kelly like owls contemplating a particularly silly mouse.

  “We just started it; we can start again,” Mike said firmly.

  Kelly looked at the screen. Paused, it actually gave the percentage completion of the movie—which gave the complete lie to what her boyfriend was saying.

  Xi followed Kelly’s gaze and giggled.

  “Well, we can start again, anyway,” she said. “We’re not letting you go to sleep on your own; that’s for sure. Get over here,” she repeated.

  Kelly obeyed, dropping onto the couch next to Mike and promptly finding Xi Wu draped across both of their laps. At that close proximity, she realized that her Mage girlfriend was mostly naked.

  The movie reset and Kelly exhaled slowly, leaning against the warmth of her lovers as much of the day’s tension left her.

  “Hell of a day.”

  “I hear you,” Mike agreed, his arm snaking around her waist and pulling her close to him. “You did good. Now relax.”

  She rested her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. They might have restarted the movie for her, but she never saw more than the first few minutes.

  21

  Red Falcon arrived in the Darius System to almost exactly what Maria and the rest of her crew had expected. Sitting in the simulacrum chamber at the heart of the big freighter, Maria studied the screens around her as the sensors drank deep of the light around them and the information it carried.

  “Alessandra, go sleep,” she ordered bluntly.

  Barrow was still hanging onto the simulacrum, barely standing as the effort of the jump spell left her. She wavered for a moment but then nodded and began to shuffle out.

  The rest of Falcon’s Mages were still there, but Wu and Nguyen watched as Maria reclaimed the semiliquid silver model. Datafeeds around them told her the story of the system, years of practice with the iconography of the Martian Navy turning icons and text abbreviations into easily read data.

  Darius had no asteroid belts. Only one gas giant, orbiting at the outer edge of the star system. Fourteen rocky worlds of various sizes hung between the yellow dwarf star and its massive outer companion.

  Only Darius itself, the fourth planet, was habitable. A gorgeously perfect world, with two large continents on its equator and four smaller ones scattered north and south. It was the kind of planet that easily made the leap from Fringe to MidWorld as millions of people flocked to its forests and beaches.

  A continent-wide desert on one of the smaller continents had become the home to most of Darius’s industry, with more in orbit.

  The orbital platforms told the story of the civil war more than anything else Maria could see. Eighteen space stations, ranging from a standard ring station–style orbital dock to what looked like the embryo of a shipyard, orbited Darius.

  All were dark. Even the hab modules had been placed in standby and evacuated. An SDC corvette hung above each of the six largest platforms, playing mothership to a small squadron of shuttles presumably making sure that the power plants were sufficiently maintained to prevent disaster.

  In a higher orbit, positioned equidistantly around the equator, were another twenty jump-corvettes. There was no way any ship could get to the planet without crossing the interception path of at least one of the ships and more likely half of them.

  Last, but far from least, a high polar orbit held the Stellarite Development Corps main striking force. Eight half-megaton heavy corvettes backed by a pair of the Golden Bears’ seven-hundred-thousand-ton monitors.

  “I thought Seule said there were ten SDC heavies?” Wu asked.

  “I’m guessing the squadron that came after us came from here,” Maria replied. “He blew one to pieces and we bashed the crap out of another. I’m guessing that one went home…but he didn’t see the Golden Bears’ ships, so that makes up the difference.”

  She considered the relative weight of the poorly-designed SDC ships versus the monitors they’d fought before. Even on a mass basis, the monitors were bigger ships, but they were also far better designed.

  “More than makes up the difference,” she concluded aloud. “Those two monitors are probably worth as much as the eight heavy corvettes combined.”

  “So…we’re not fighting these guys, right?” Nguyen asked slowly. “I mean…we could take the monitors or the heavy corvettes or the little guys…probably. But all of them together?”

  “That’s what the plan is for,” Maria told her subordinates as Red Falcon’s engines lit up. “Let’s see what the SDC has to say for themselves.”

  Maria didn’t have high expectations of the SDC’s corporate security fleet’s professionalism, but it still took far longer than she’d been expecting for them to respond to Red Falcon’s presence. Even ignoring the fact that Falcon had been involved in a battle with ships from the blockade only a few days before, they were still a merchant ship heading toward a blockade.

  It took just over an hour for the first message to arrive. They were only two light-minutes away, which meant the blockaders had taken their time getting around to it.

  The background of the video message looked like the flag deck of any warship in the Martian Navy. The SDC’s d
esigner had clearly decided to crib at least some features from the only real professional Navy around.

  The Navy, of course, would have had software that automatically blurred out the tactical display behind the pudgy suited man standing in front of the camera with a baleful look. Since SDC didn’t have that, Maria realized that they now had complete details on the readiness of the blockade fleet.

  Assuming those details were accurate. Her faith in them was…low.

  “This is Security Vice-President Wayne Charleston of the Stellarite Development Corps,” the suited man said in what was presumably intended to be an intimidating tone. He managed to sound more bored than anything else.

  “The Darius System has been closed to outside shipping per the orders of Governor Nina Yesim Ellis,” he continued. “The SDC has agreed to maintain a blockade of the planet on the government’s behalf to prevent outsiders from arming the rebel factions.

  “If you approach the planet, you will be boarded and your ship confiscated. We are authorized by Governor Ellis to use all necessary force to achieve this. You are hereby ordered to exit the Darius System in an orderly fashion.”

  The message ended and Maria shook her head. She glanced at the link to the bridge.

  “Was that live, skipper?” she asked.

  “It was,” LaMonte confirmed before Rice could respond. “I’m processing that tactical display, but did they even look at our transponder code?”

  “We’re not exactly hiding who we are,” the Captain said. “So, I’m guessing no. I’m curious to see what they say as we keep coming.”

  “Huh,” Jeeves interjected in a somewhat-pleased tone. “Those monitors? They clearly are reading our transponder beacon. They both just lit up their engines and broke orbit—away from us.”

  There was an evil chuckle across both the bridge and the simulacrum chamber.

  “I wonder if mister Security Vice-President over there is willing to listen when his mercenaries run?” Maria asked. “That can’t be good for the Bears’ reputation.”