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

by Glynn Stewart

  “Welcome to the shadows,” David replied, his grin fading. “We’ll find Kovac. Then we’ll see what kind of persuasion it takes to get data out of him.”

  There was a certain special kind of bar for the sort of dredging David was currently engaged in. It wasn’t dingy or dirty, but it was dimly lit and the music was set at just the right volume to effectively replicate the effect of a white-noise generator.

  It wasn’t in the rundown areas of the station known for crime, but it was right next door to them. The drinks were expensive and quality but plain. The furniture was of much the same style as the drinks, and the crowd was an eclectic mix of shippers, ship crews, businessmen, and criminals pretending to be one of the first three.

  David was far from the only ship’s officer there, and none of them had come unescorted. Two of the more looming members of Leonhart’s security team joined David at the table he claimed as he ordered drinks and bar food.

  Like the rest of the officers, he was “here for a quiet drink.” No one officially came there looking for business, and he wasn’t even sure he’d get a bite tonight. This was about appearing available and letting his reputation precede him.

  They were into the second basket of chicken wings when someone unexpectedly dropped down at their table. David looked at the woman who joined them and smiled thinly. She had long blond hair and piercing green eyes, and was dressed like she was out to solicit offers for “paid company”—but he recognized the way she carried herself.

  In fact, he realized with a blink, he recognized her. Not exactly, her height was wrong, but she fit into a particular bodysculpted and bioengineered mold he’d encountered before. A very specific one.

  “I’m guessing you know a young lady named Turquoise,” he pointed out before the woman said a word. “How can I help you?”

  The woman chuckled.

  “Fascinating, Captain,” she replied. “Most men don’t get much past the clothing and the staring at my tits. I haven’t spoken with Turquoise in years, but yes, I knew her. You can call me Indigo.”

  David nodded. Turquoise and a number of other young women had been acquired as sex slaves by a crime boss and “upgraded” as his personal assassins and bodyguards. Turquoise had replaced said crime boss when the Blue Star Syndicate had disintegrated by covert if bloody means.

  “Well, Indigo”—he inclined his head—“I am Captain David Rice. How can I help you?” he echoed.

  “I don’t work for my sister anymore, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Indigo told him. “These days, I’m more of an independent information broker here in Condor, and I think I may be potentially able to help you.”

  David had figured that Indigo didn’t work for Turquoise anymore. Turquoise had tried to stab him in the back and had lost her entire pirate fleet doing so. If she was still in control of her little empire, she wasn’t going to want to talk to David Rice.

  “And what help do you think I need?” he asked. “I’m just here for drinks.”

  Indigo chuckled again.

  “Speaking of which, you should buy me one to avoid suspicion,” she purred. “It’s safer for us both if people think we’re negotiating a different kind of transaction.”

  David echoed her chuckle but waved the bartender over and did so.

  “You’re here because you’re dredging for work of a certain type,” Indigo concluded as the bartender drifted away. “You’ve a big ship, Captain. A fast one, too, if I read the data right. Not many in any business looking for cargo of that scale.”

  “I’ve heard of at least one,” David said, figuring he may as well test the waters. “Man named Kovac.”

  “You’ve done your research, I see,” she said. “Not even sure you need little old me.” Her throaty purr of a chuckle was sending shivers down his spine, and he knew it was a well-practiced act.

  “Kovac might be able to fill your hold, Captain, but Kovac doesn’t work with strangers,” she continued. “I might be able to put you in touch, but it’s not easy. He’s a recluse at the best of times, and he’s been very quiet of late.”

  “I’ll talk to anyone with a cargo worth hauling my ship around, but I suspect he might be the only shadow broker with one,” David replied. “And anyone else, well… I can talk to a regular broker, can’t I, Indigo?”

  She smiled.

  “I don’t take cash up front,” she told him. “But I’m not cheap. I’ll get you your meeting with Kovac.”

  “How much?” he asked.

  “A million. Bearer credit chits on the Bank of Olympus Mons.”

  David winced. There was no more reliable payment method—but getting his hands on BOM bearer credit chits in Condor could easily cost him twice the face value.

  Of course, David already had that on hand in his MISS discretionary funds, but he didn’t want Indigo to know that.

  “Five hundred thousand on BOM,” he countered. “Or I could do eight on Bank of Condor.”

  He could get Bank of Condor bearer chits by walking into any branch on the station, though eight hundred thousand would take some fast talking.

  “One point five on Condor or eight on BOM,” she said. “Not a credit less.”

  “Six hundred on Olympus Mons,” he told her.

  “Seven.”

  “Six thirty.”

  “Six fifty.”

  “Done,” he agreed. “You get paid when I meet Kovac.”

  “Agreed,” she said. “I’m not guaranteeing a deal, though.”

  “I know,” David allowed. “I’m pretty sure I can manage that on my own.”

  Or, potentially, kidnap the gunrunner. But Indigo didn’t need to know that part.

  30

  Maria walked into the plush quiet of the wealth management firm with a strong sense that she was intruding. This was the kind of company where even starship captains were only potentially qualified to be clients—though its presence on McMurdo Station suggested that they were the target client for this particular office.

  The woman behind the desk had dark brown hair and the kind of agelessly perfect face that spoke to spectacularly expensive bodysculpt. She wore a tailored demure black suit and managed to look down her nose at Maria without shifting position.

  “Can I help you, Mage…”

  “Soprano,” Maria told her. “Ship’s Mage Maria Soprano. Whether you can help me, though, depends on whether you have a package waiting for me from Olympus Mons.”

  The woman was good. She didn’t even blink at the recognition pass phrase, though her dismissive body language relaxed slightly.

  “We see little traffic from Olympus Mons, but there’s always a special package or two; let me check,” she said gruffly, completing the recognition sequence.

  Maria triggered a confirming transmission from her wrist-comp to the other woman’s computer and was rewarded with a quick nod.

  “If you don’t mind, Mage Soprano, I’ll put you in one of our meeting rooms to wait?”

  “Of course,” Maria allowed. She followed the woman into the office and found herself quickly ushered into a small meeting room designed for maybe four people.

  “I’m Kelsey Amber,” the woman introduced herself. “Welcome to MISS McMurdo Station, Mage Soprano. How can we assist you?”

  “My crew and I need a full background briefing package on the local politics and underworld,” Maria told her. “None of us are familiar with the Principality, but duty brings us to strange places.”

  “Of course,” Amber responded. “May I ask what does bring you here, or is that…”

  “Classified,” the Mage replied with a smile. “What I can tell you is that we’re looking for Mahometus Kovac, a gunrunner of some reputation here. Any information you have on him would be valuable.”

  “Kovac is on our radar,” Amber confirmed. “He’s been laying low recently, from what we can tell, but we have nothing to suggest he’s left the system. Or even McMurdo Station, for that matter.”

  “That’s helpful,” Maria sai
d. “How dangerous is this man, Ms. Amber? We need to get information out of him that he isn’t going to want to divulge.”

  “He’s…” She sighed. “In and of himself, he’s not incredibly dangerous, but he does hire some extremely capable protection. He’s not one to pursue vengeance unless there’s a profit in it, and he has a solid sense of when to cut his losses. No one in his business is a pussycat, Mage Soprano, and at the end of the day, he’s a mercenary.

  “Enough money should loosen his tongue.”

  Maria nodded. They could apply money. MISS’s budget wasn’t infinite, but they could buy gunrunners out of petty cash without noticing.

  “Do you know where he’s headquartered?”

  “Sadly, no,” Amber admitted. “We keep a loose eye on his movements, but he’s been surprisingly successful at hiding his home and his offices from our investigation. We’ve never had a reason to throw full-scale resources at him, though; he’s generally fallen into the ‘better the devil we know’ category.”

  “Can you make it happen?” Maria asked.

  The local sighed.

  “Your authentication code says you can make us make it happen,” she pointed out. “I’ll have to bounce that up the chain and have others redirect resources. Obviously, we’ll want to keep your contact with anyone other than me to a minimum, but we can see what we can dig up.”

  “Good,” Maria said. David had his approach. She had this approach. Hopefully, they’d meet somewhere in the middle and squeeze out a gunrunner.

  The local MISS files were illuminating, if not exactly cheery. Maria went through the high-level summaries attached to the reports and briefings while she waited for Amber to confirm that her superiors were going to respect the authority Maria’s authentication codes gave her.

  Covert ops ships like Red Falcon needed the cooperation of local authorities, so they were given pretty broad authority to command local resources. The flip side of that, of course, was that said local authorities were supposed to speak up if the requests threatened existing operations or sources—and the ship crews were supposed to listen.

  From the file, she could see several areas they might have problems helping with. La Cosa Nostra—the current evolution of the Old Earth Mafia—had large chunks of Condor’s interstellar shipping tied up hard. They had the resources to cause MISS problems, though they’d generally choose not to pick that fight.

  Kovac had to be tied up with la Cosa Nostra if he was organizing gunrunning operations out of Condor. Which made the fact that the MISS investigations hadn’t found such a link fascinating and was probably part of why MISS hadn’t turned over the information they had to local authorities.

  The man’s operations were intriguing, and his level of information control was impressive. He hadn’t been a priority of the MISS, but he’d clearly caught their attention—and by and large, they’d learned nothing.

  “Mage Soprano?”

  Maria looked up to see Amber standing at the door.

  “Yes?”

  “We’re going to send out our feelers,” the local agent told her. “We can’t spare everything, but we’ve a couple of agents who have been the key figures in what investigations we have done into Kovac. They’ll focus their efforts on him for the next few days, at least, until we can track him down.”

  “He’s got a fascinating operation,” Maria noted. “I don’t think I’ve seen such an odd mix of us knowing both so much and so little about a crime op.”

  “We’re not the people he’s hiding from,” Amber replied. “He works with la Cosa Nostra, but he isn’t part of them. He isn’t even an associate, which makes him a target anytime a made man wants to try and pull together their own gunrunning operation piggybacking on the existing smuggling runs through here.

  “None of them have succeeded yet…and at least two have ended up dead.” The artificially perfect MISS operative shrugged. “I don’t shed many tears for made men, Mage Soprano, and Kovac has been a useful foil.

  “But he’s also been an enigma. If he’d been more trouble, that would have been enough on its own to get our attention, but…he wasn’t. I’m guessing that’s changed?”

  Maria chuckled.

  “I doubt he’s been more trouble,” she admitted. “But he’s definitely got into the wrong trouble.”

  “We’ll find him for you,” Amber promised. “I presume you have the resources to go from there?”

  Returning to Red Falcon, Maria ran into Leonhart on the way. The Marine Forward Combat Intelligence officer looked furious, ready to chew nails and spit bullets. Four of her team were accompanying her, carrying what looked like the results of a decent-sized shopping run for supplies for Red Falcon’s security team.

  “Chief?” Maria asked softly. “What’s up?”

  “Not here,” Leonhart snapped, glancing around. “Definitely not here. Conners! Keep that damn crate off the ground; let’s not blow ourselves up, shall we?”

  Artificial gravity runes marked a central pathway along most of the corridors in the hub of McMurdo Station. Anything bigger than the single pair of large crates that the security troops were hauling would probably have been more easily transported by sending it drifting along the zero-gravity section several feet away.

  Maria kept her peace with a concealed smile. The crate of explosives hadn’t come within more than three or four centimeters of the ground, and she doubted that Leonhart had bought explosives crude enough that bouncing them off the floor would be a problem, regardless.

  “Can I help with any of that?” she asked instead.

  “We’ve got it,” Conners, a fair-haired younger trooper with a broad grin, said cheerfully. “It’s all under control boss, ma’am…bosses.”

  Leonhart rolled her eyes but gestured for her totally-not-Marines-we-swear to lead the way as Maria fell in beside her for the remainder of the walk back to the ship.

  “Nice enough station, I suppose,” the security chief grumped. “Appreciate the effort to provide at least some gravity here.”

  At least a third of the stations they visited didn’t have any gravity in the sections of the station that were held steady to make docking easier. It was an expensive luxury—an often-useful luxury, but still a luxury.

  “The Prince has money and wants to put a good foot forward with the interstellar shippers,” Maria replied. “Last I checked, doesn’t he own McMurdo Station outright?”

  Leonhart snorted.

  “No, the Principality owns McMurdo Station,” the security chief corrected. “The Prince ‘just’ owns the company that manages the docks.”

  They checked in with the guards at the airlock linking them back to Red Falcon, and then Leonhart dismissed her people before leaning against a wall and letting loose a string of profanity in more languages than Maria could count.

  “You couldn’t get into the law enforcement files, I’d guess?” Maria asked as the stream slowed.

  “Oh, we got in, all right,” Leonhart replied. “I’ve seen fucking ice cream trucks with more security on their computer systems. We got in. So, it seems, has everyone who has so much as thought of the idea in the last ten years.”

  The Marine shook her head.

  “So, according to the files of the McMurdo Station Police Department, Kovac doesn’t even exist. Either they’re completely incompetent, or their computers are a false front while they do all of their work on paper.”

  Maria thought back to the MISS files and sighed.

  “According to MISS, MSPD is basically bought and paid for by la Cosa Nostra,” she noted. “Kovac spends a lot of his resources hiding from la Cosa Nostra, so keeping the MSPD off his back would be useful to him.”

  “This doesn’t even look like corruption. Just incompetence,” Leonhart admitted. “Hell, I’m not sure I even buy incompetence. The MSPD is just…”

  “A disaster,” Maria concluded. “Competing priorities alongside leadership that’s been bought by their major organized crime syndicate. I suspect even the Pr
incipality doesn’t rely on them for more than the basics if they can avoid it.”

  “Which might explain why I can’t even find an office of the Principality Security Bureau,” the Marine admitted. “I’m guessing there’s at least one on the station—there’s over a hundred and fifty thousand people on McMurdo and the surrounding platforms.”

  “Not to mention thirty or forty percent of their interstellar trade stops here, and the fees fund a good third of the Principality’s budget,” Maria agreed. “The PSB has got to be here.” She offered a datachip to the Marine.

  “And if it is, I’m guessing the MISS files will say where, won’t they?”

  31

  “Well, if it makes anyone feel any better, even the underworld information brokers aren’t sure how to get in touch with Kovac,” David told his officers after they’d reported in. “You’re telling me the cops had nothing?”

  “I don’t mean they had nothing on Kovac. They had nothing on anybody,” Leonhart replied. “Calling the MSPD glorified mall cops is being charitable.”

  “And the system security force is disturbingly absent,” Soprano added. “They’ve got to be here, but even MISS doesn’t know where their offices are located.”

  “And nobody knows where Kovac works or lives,” David concluded. “That’s impressive as hell, if damn frustrating.” He thought about it for a moment. “Not to mention bloody weird. We did Seule enough of a favor that I’m relatively sure he’d have told us if there was a trick to finding the man.”

  “From what MISS’s files say, you don’t find Kovac,” his Ship’s Mage told him. “He finds you. If you ask enough questions about arms smuggling or him by name in the right quarters, he decides if you’re a threat and makes contact.”

  “So, he should be reaching out to us,” David said. He shook his head. “That’s not reassuring, really. Him making contact with us doesn’t really lend itself to kidnapping and interrogation—and that’s assuming he doesn’t flag us as a threat.”