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

by Glynn Stewart

  “Is the Prince a Mage?” Soprano asked. “Are we looking at a Mage aristocracy or something…else?”

  “Something else,” LaMonte replied. “There isn’t an official aristocracy outside the Prince’s family, though Mages have the usual Compact privileges and value. The Prince is specifically barred from being a Mage, and his family is discouraged from marrying Mages, too. Balance of power, I’d guess.”

  That was a more reasonable compromise than many David had heard of. Mages were powerful, valued members of society, and the Compact between Mage and mundane had been written by men and women who had been slaves. It erred on the side of protecting Mages rather than protecting equality.

  Imposing a major power nexus that was specifically barred from being Mages made sense to him.

  “So, we go to Condor,” Leonhart said. “I’ll have my people brush up on bodyguarding and so forth. What else do we need to worry about?”

  “Condor should be safe enough,” David told his security chief. “Given what we’re going to Condor for, though, we may need your people to brush up on kidnapping instead.”

  “We call that ‘involuntary asset extraction,’” Leonhart said primly.

  The Captain snorted. “Whatever we’re calling it, we need to be prepared to get our hands on this Kovac fellow. I don’t think he’s going to want to tell us everything just because we showed up and asked nicely.”

  David studied the astrography chart LaMonte had up and linked into it with his wrist-comp. With a dash of his fingers, he slowly rotated the three-dimensional image to confirm what he was checking for.

  “Tau Ceti is on the way, pretty much exactly at the halfway point,” he pointed out to his people. “I suggest we stop in there for fuel and supplies—and to check in with MISS. I’m relatively sure we can get a cargo from Tau Ceti to justify our showing up in Condor, too. Thankfully, no one is going to question us showing up in our home port empty.

  “Well, not much.”

  “Sounds good,” Kellers noted, the engineer speaking up for the first time. “We’ve been lucky so far, but I wouldn’t mind a day or three in a decent slip to poke at a few of the shakier parts of the ship.”

  “Then we’ll make it happen,” David promised. “Twelve to thirteen days to Condor versus nine to ten doesn’t sound like that big a deal to me. Kovac sent this shipment over a year ago. I doubt he’s expecting questions now!”

  Laying out the course for their journey fell to Maria, of course. She wouldn’t have it any other way, though she was more and more getting Xi Wu to help her with the task. Young as she was, the powerful Mage would likely soon move on to another ship.

  If nothing else, Maria expected LaMonte to find herself a new command sooner rather than later, and Xi Wu and Mike Kelzin would inevitably go with her. The pair had followed her to Red Falcon, and wherever any of them went from here, the others would go.

  Maria envied them that. She envied them the bright smile Wu flashed her as she disappeared from the sanctum, returning to her quarters. None of her relationships had ever had the calm warmth and certainty the unlikely trio seemed to muster with ease.

  The movie night with Kellers had ended up just being a one-off snuggle. They hadn’t even slept together, which she found herself regretting now. The engineer wasn’t her usual type. He was older than her, for one thing, and calmer than many of her lovers.

  Smarter too, she had to admit. Her taste had not run to…intellectual men. Capable men, yes, though that hadn’t always ended well. Red Falcon’s first tactical officer had been a capable man—and had proven as capable at betraying them as anything else.

  Kellers was also either uninterested or…shy. The latter possibility didn’t quite fit in Maria’s head, but neither did the first. Perhaps she was egotistical enough to assume that no man was completely uninterested in her, but she also didn’t think that he’d have suggested the movie night idea without at least some deeper intent.

  Maria chuckled to herself. She’d spent much of her life pursuing men of one stripe or another. Not usually for more than a single night’s fling, but…well, at least some of the skills had to transfer over.

  And if nothing else, she knew that Tau Ceti hosted a significant Spanish-speaking population. There had to be something she could use the same excuse he’d used to drag him out to.

  And from there, well, they’d see what happened, wouldn’t they?

  25

  David was completely unsurprised by the message he received within ten minutes of Red Falcon docking at her home station. On the surface, it was a dinner invitation from a cargo broker they hadn’t worked with before.

  Reading between the lines, it was an instruction to report for debrief and bring Soprano and LaMonte with him. He’d been expecting the message and sent back his response immediately before studying the situation he was in.

  Through a simple holding company, David owned two docking slips there in Tau Ceti along with a small office complex. His second ship, Peregrine, was home about as often as Red Falcon was but was exactly what she appeared to be on the surface. He’d moved his people who didn’t want to be spies over to Peregrine and made them all keel-plate owners in a new ship.

  It seemed to have worked out, and every time Peregrine’s financial reports—and attached funds—caught up with him, they’d been a pleasant surprise. She was a relatively standard ship with a small suite of defensive guns added due to David’s history.

  Amber was as much home as Tau Ceti these days, thanks to Keiko Alabaster, and both were far more home than Mars, where, he was reasonably sure, his never-to-be-sufficiently cursed father still lived.

  Twelve light-years was about as close as David Rice cared to get to Samuel Rice. The elder Rice had been in jail for the death of David’s mother when David had joined the Navy, and David had never told him where he was going.

  With thirty more years between them, David could accept that his mother’s death in a boating accident had truly been an accident, negligence rather than malice, like the courts had decided. There was still a long gap between that acceptance and forgiving his father.

  Tau Ceti and Red Falcon were better homes, and he had a better family there. Speaking of… he opened a channel to his two senior officers’ wrist-comps.

  “Our lords and masters have checked in,” he told them. If internal coms aboard Red Falcon weren’t secure enough for that snark, he had far bigger problems. “Debrief is at dinner at the Purple Legate, twenty hundred hours OMT.”

  “Should I wear a dress?” LaMonte asked lightly. The Purple Legate Italian restaurant was known for its discretion and privacy—and also for being one of the two or three nicest restaurants in the orbitals of Tau Ceti’s inhabited worlds.

  “Does either of you even own a dress?” he said.

  “I do,” Soprano replied. “I think I have bikinis with more cloth involved than that outfit, but I do own a dress.”

  “I hadn’t even considered that as an option,” LaMonte said. “I’m sure I can find a halter-top and a miniskirt; we’d be close to matching.”

  The Ship’s Mage laughed.

  “No, you’d still be more dressed than me,” she admitted. “By a lot.”

  David sighed.

  “Ship’s uniforms, if you please,” he said with false plaintiveness. “Given my experience with our MISS contacts, you two showing up like that might outright kill our poor debriefer with a heart attack!”

  “Yes, sir,” his officers chorused with unfailing innocence.

  “Are we likely to be rushed out?” LaMonte asked after a moment. “I can ask Kellers to hold off on starting his repair work.”

  “No,” David replied. “The type of work Kellers wants to do is easily put back together if they need us to turn around overnight, but I can’t see it. They wanted us following these leads and I’m following them to Condor. I can’t see us being pulled off of that.”

  “Good,” Maria said crisply. She hadn’t been the one talking about delays and David
wondered why she was happy they were staying.

  He then decided there were probably things he didn’t want to know.

  The Purple Legate was on the top floor of one of the station’s main galleries, surrounded and interlaced with small trees while allowing an awe-inspiring view of a thirty-story drop ringed with businesses.

  The faint buzz of white-noise generators assaulted the senses as they entered the restaurant. It soon faded into the background, but it was a comforting noise to the three spies. Privacy was important.

  “Party of three under David Rice,” David told the hostess. “We should be meeting a second party?”

  “Of course; Mr. Kieshi is waiting for you,” the older woman said instantly. “Follow me, please?”

  The white noise generators might cover the sound of conversation, leaving only the burbling of the false brook that watered the trees, but they didn’t cover the smell from the kitchen of rich tomato sauce and spices.

  Kieshi wasn’t a familiar name to David, and he had a moment of concern when they were led into the secluded dining area. He didn’t recognize the elderly Asian man sitting at the end of the table. He did, as he realized with relief after a moment, recognize the other man in the room.

  Brent Alois was an old standby in the Tau Ceti MISS office, the agent responsible for recruiting many new personnel—including Maria Soprano—while also running, as David understood it, the main counterintelligence operation for the Navy Base in Tau Ceti. The balding old man tossed the new guests a weak salute and gestured them to the table.

  “Captain Rice, Mage Soprano, Officer LaMonte,” Alois greeted them. “Be known to Kieshi Deng, System Director for Tau Ceti.”

  “Normally, your high-level contacts were with Hand Stealey,” Kieshi said politely in a soft Earth Asian accent. “I saw no need to interfere with what appeared to be a highly functional relationship. With Hand Stealey’s regrettable passing, however, it behooves me to make contact, Captain, Mage, Officer.”

  “A pleasure,” David said, extending his hand and taking Kieshi’s surprisingly firm grip. “I didn’t know who ran the Tau Ceti Station for Mars.”

  “We try to keep your kind of independent operative out of that sort of loop,” Kieshi said frankly. “You go into harm’s way more than most of my people, and that means information you possess is at a certain degree of risk.

  “You also need a top-level contact for your kind of operation,” he continued. “So, here we are. I understand you just left Darius? Our reports on the situation there are incomplete and…unpleasant.”

  “I presume there are actions in place to deal with the situation?” David asked.

  “I can’t say much, due to security, but yes,” Kieshi confirmed. “Knowing your rather cataclysmic effect on the enemies of Mars as you pass through, I wonder if those actions will still be necessary.”

  “You may need to adjust your plans, I’ll admit,” David said as Maria choked next to him. “How much detail do you need?”

  Kieshi held up a hand as a buzzer sounded. “A high level will suffice for now, though I presume you have a report. But let us order. The food here lives up to its reputation.”

  A few minutes of perusing the menu and ordering drinks and wine, then the waiter slipped away again.

  “As part of our pursuit of the supply chain for the weapons on Ardennes, we ended up taking on a contract to deliver weaponry to the Darius government,” David explained quickly. “The system was under a tight blockade by the security forces of the Stellarite Development Corps, so the original plan for delivery by Captain Seule and his blockade runner seemed unworkable.”

  “We were aware of that cargo,” Kieshi confirmed, adding weight to Seule’s suggestion that Mars had helped Darius pay for it. “It was delivered nonetheless?”

  “Despite the best efforts of the SDC ships, yes,” David confirmed. “While we attempted to avoid engaging any SDC ships, my understanding is that several of their heavy corvettes were either destroyed or crippled and forced to return to Legatus.

  “With the cargo in place, the Darius government appears to have regained control of their immediate orbital space. I have no idea how the civil war has progressed, but with the cargo we delivered, I am hopeful.”

  Kieshi smiled.

  “That is good news,” he told David. “I’ll want your full report, as I said, to go over in detail and assess how we’ll change our measures. If the Darius government is fully in control of their world, we shall need to arrange for them to properly request Navy assistance against the SDC, if Stellarite hasn’t learned their lesson already.”

  “There will be consequences for SDC for their involvement,” Alois added. “That part of the file has already been passed on to Hand Lomond.”

  David winced. He hadn’t liked any of the SDC people he’d met, but few deserved to have the man the media called the Sword of Mars unleashed on them.

  “And your main mission?” Kieshi asked.

  “Captain Seule provided us with the name of his contact, a Mahometus Kovac in the Condor System,” David reported. “We’re en route to make contact ourselves. In the absence of cooperation or the ability to steal it from his files, we may be forced to, well, kidnap the man for interrogation.”

  “Kovac is known to us,” the System Director confirmed. “I’ll make sure you have a warrant for that before you leave Tau Ceti. We know enough to put him behind bars as it is, but it’s useful to leave some of those middlemen in place.”

  “If we’re lucky, he can lead us to Legatus—or at least one more step along the chain,” David agreed.

  “Regional Director Van der Merwe is still working on digging out more information from Ardennes,” Alois noted. “They passed on more information for us to give you. It sounds like we’ve got a hard link to Kovac, which puts him ahead of the other two names Van der Merwe has pulled up.”

  “More middlemen, I presume?” David asked.

  “Exactly,” Kieshi confirmed. “Mitre Borghi, at Amber, and Mehrab Gorman at Sherwood. Neither are major players, we know Borghi is a smaller source than Kovac, and if Gorman is a gunrunner, he’s evaded our attention so far.”

  “Sherwood isn’t exactly known as a gunrunning hub,” LaMonte pointed out.

  “And that’s probably why he’s evaded our attention,” Kieshi agreed. “I leave your exact courses of action up to you, Captain Rice; you know this situation as well as anyone now. The less general havoc, the better, but I understand the requirements of our job.”

  Further immediate “work conversation” was cut short by the arrival of the food.

  Once they’d finished eating, Kieshi leaned back from the table and studied David and his officers with a calm expression.

  “You know what you need to do,” he told them. “Better than I do, I’m sure. My policy has never been to micromanage if I can avoid it, just to make sure my people have the resources they need. So, what do you need?”

  David considered thoughtfully as he took the last swallow of his single glass of wine.

  “It’s hard to anticipate,” he admitted. “We’ll need a cargo contract to justify us going to Condor, but that’s not unusual for us. In terms of resources…more antimatter missiles won’t go amiss if we can sneak them aboard. Any stealth gear that might make infiltration easier on Leonhart’s people, though I don’t know what they’re trained with.”

  Alois chuckled.

  “They’re Forward Combat Intelligence,” the ex-Marine officer turned spy pointed out. “I do know what they’re trained with, and there’s a few toys you wouldn’t have to hand that might be useful.”

  “We should be able to sneak a cargo container of Phoenix VIIIs in with your main cargo,” Kieshi said thoughtfully. “I might be able to break free a trained interrogator or two, but…”

  “I believe Major Leonhart is fully qualified in that field,” Alois argued.

  “I believe so as well,” David agreed. “We have a lot of the resources we need already. KEX-12 was set u
p that way intentionally, to allow us to operate completely independently as much as possible.”

  “You’re not the only covert ops ship, but you might be the one with the most complete setup,” Kieshi agreed. “It’s a concept we’re going to try and duplicate, I think, though probably with less ostentatious ships. More concealed weapons and, well, less-notorious captains.”

  “My reputation has been both a help and a curse for our operations,” David admitted. “I think—I hope—the good has outweighed the bad.”

  Kieshi chuckled.

  “By a long shot, Captain Rice. Hand Stealey chose well when she recruited you,” he said. “This mission might be one of the more critical we’ve ever sent you on. Or at least the most potentially fruitful.”

  “There has to be more proof out there of Legatan misbehavior than this one chain,” Maria argued. “If they’re dabbling as widely as we think they are…”

  “We have a lot of circumstance and guesses,” Kieshi said quietly. “A mountain of said circumstance and guesses. Enough that projects to raise funds from loyal systems to build new secret fleets are being negotiated, but we need time and we need proof. Enough to drag before the Council of the Protectorate and have those notoriously stubborn representatives sign off on sanctioning the Legatan government.”

  “They’re preparing for civil war,” Maria objected. “We know this.”

  “We, as in MISS, believe we know this,” the System Director agreed. “Without proof, though, all we have is circumstance. Without evidence that we can intern an entire planetary government with, all we can do is begin our own quiet preparations for civil war.”

  David shivered.

  “Is it going to come to that?” he asked softly.

  “Not for years, if ever,” Kieshi guessed. “But if we find proof now, before they’re ready, the Navy and the Marines can prevent it ever getting that bad.”