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

by Glynn Stewart

  “Shh,” David ordered, even though he nodded his understanding. They were alone and the Marines were speaking quietly, but the last thing Red Falcon’s crew needed was for anyone to realize that the security detachment were Marine Forward Combat Intelligence troops.

  That would, at a minimum, raise all sorts of questions David didn’t want to answer.

  David was starting to wonder if he shouldn’t take Soprano and the extra Marines and leave Binici alone to work on the door for a few hours, when the Marine waved them back over. She’d opened up a section of the station wall that she was carefully reattaching as they approached.

  “Okay, so I now have control of the airlock,” she told him. “But, well…that’s it. Military-grade encryption and security, and the damn front door is air-gapped from the rest of the house. Any other computers are completely cut off from the station.”

  “Sounds like we found the right place,” David said.

  “Seems likely, but boss…if the front door is this secure, I’m guessing there’s at least one more layer of defenses. And if he isn’t expecting anyone to get through the front entrance without either permission or high-level cracking…”

  “Said defenses are probably not polite,” he agreed. “Maria?”

  “We’ll deal with it,” the ex-Navy Mage said grimly. “Figuring auto-turrets and maybe security bots?”

  “That would be my guess,” Binici replied. “There’s probably a central controller, but…”

  “We’ll need to disable the systems directly,” David concluded. “Are we equipped for that?”

  He hadn’t been expecting to deal with automated security. His pistol was a perfectly effective weapon against humans in light or no armor, but it wasn’t going to deal with automatic turrets and combat robots.

  Both of which were horrendously illegal for a laundry list of reasons, but the most useful setup for them was a closed killing zone where the system was either on or off and anyone who entered while it was on was expected to die.

  That seemed…in character for what he’d heard of Kovac.

  “We’ve got a couple of EMP grenades and, well, Mage Soprano,” Binici told him. “It’s not an optimal plan, but it should be enough.”

  “All right,” David said grimly. “Then I guess we make it happen. Ready?”

  Binici pulled two plain black cylinders from inside her jacket and passed them to the other Marines, several of whom produced identical cylinders themselves.

  A quick inventory counted up five EMP grenades across the four Marines, but Binici was going to be hanging back with the kit she’d wired into the door.

  “We’re ready,” she confirmed.

  The electronics tech hit her commands and the door slid open. A second door was roughly a meter inside the first, but it proceeded to slide open as well as Binici overrode the airlock’s safety protocols—only possible, David suspected, because the exterior was breathable and the hardwired protocols didn’t engage.

  Two of the Marines went in instantly, assault carbines at the ready and EMP grenades held against the carbine stock. David had enough time to see that the space past the second airlock door was a gorgeously decorated entryway with wood paneling before the Marines were blocking his view as they retreated.

  “Grenades, now,” one of them snapped as he tossed the EMP bomb he was holding forward and dived out of the doorway, pushing David aside.

  At least three EMP grenades went through the doorway to land in the hallway David could no longer see. He heard the CRACK of the grenades detonating and felt the pulse wave. His implants were hardened against EMP, and there was a solid wall between him and the carefully designed short-range emitters, but he still felt his cybernetic lung skip a breath.

  He coughed against the sudden shortness of breath, but his lung kicked back into gear instantly.

  “After me,” Soprano barked, the Mage leading the way back into the apartment suite. There was a hiss-crackle of lightning, quite distinct from the crack of the grenade’s emitter.

  A few seconds passed. There were the muffled retorts of suppressed gunshots, then silence.

  “Clear,” Soprano announced. “Let’s get everyone in and seal the airlock,” she suggested. “The gunfire shouldn’t attract attention, but…”

  David waved for Binici to follow him and stepped through into the entryway.

  The plain exterior of the apartment suite gave way to luxury almost immediately after he left the airlock. Wood paneling covered the walls and floor, and what looked to have been several actual oil paintings had adorned the walls.

  Despite the obvious presence of money, the entryway had been a six-meter-long and three-meter-wide killing field with a solid-looking door at the other end. The oil paintings had concealed automated turrets, and the paneling had slid aside to reveal squat wheeled robots with guns mounted at about waist height.

  All of this had activated when the Marines had first entered, and been exposed when the EMP grenades had gone off. It had all been disabled when Soprano came in and fried the turrets, but the Marines had taken the time to locate and shoot the CPU on each robot nonetheless.

  “Door into the rest of the place is locked,” Binici reported, then shook her head. “Not even electronic. Expensive mechanical.”

  “Can you open it?” David asked.

  “Not quickly,” she replied. “Of course, there’s always better options.”

  She pulled a tube of gray putty from inside her jacket and marked out a square around the lock. Folding up the tube, she snapped the base at a specific notch and shoved it into the putty.

  “Clear!”

  David had been the last to catch what Binici was doing, and he’d realized it well before she’d activated the detonator built into the base of the tube of explosives. Everyone was at the far side of the room when the small shaped charge detonated and blasted a neat hole out of the door.

  A hole that included the lock.

  “Go! Go!” Binici barked, and the other three Marines were through the door before she’d even finished speaking, carbines sweeping the space.

  “Clear,” they announced, and David and Soprano followed their people in.

  The main foyer of the house was actually less ostentatious than the killing room they’d come through to get there. The floor was covered in hardwood slats, but the walls had been left as painted metal. On the other hand, the foyer was easily the size of many apartments that David had been in on space stations, which was a type of ostentatious all its own. Panels in the roof and walls provided a carefully calibrated light that didn’t strain the eyes.

  “Hello, the house,” David shouted up the central stairway. Only silence responded and he shook his head as he glanced around the three-story foyer with its balconies and grand stairs. “Are the scanners showing anything?” he asked. “Computers, life signs?”

  “Nothing,” Binici said quietly. “We probably burned out the control module for the defenses, but the EMP shouldn’t have made it past the door. No computers. No people. Not even the usual household machines.”

  “Check the rooms; Soprano and I will watch the stairs,” David decided aloud. The Marines split into pairs and took the doors one at a time.

  “Kitchen,” one of them announced. “Appliances are all off.” The Marine paused. “Fridge has food in it,” he continued. “It’s all rotten.”

  “But the lights are on,” David murmured. “That seems…odd.”

  “Depends on how they took the electronics out,” Soprano pointed out. “You’re the electrical engineer. Could you do something that would burn out appliances and computers and leave lights?”

  The starship captain—who had once been an Engineering Chief Petty Officer in the Martian Navy and, as Soprano said, an electrical engineer—studied the lights.

  “Those lights are designed to last forever,” he concluded slowly. “Low drain, sealed against surges. Most appliances are also sealed against surges, though, but the lights simply don’t have the cabli
ng to pull enough power to burn themselves out.

  “Appliances and computers have to. You could flash a high-energy pulse along the wires. You’d kill some of the lights, but you’d definitely kill computers and probably appliances.”

  Especially since any kitchen appliance in a suite like this would have the hardware and software to link to a wrist-comp.

  “But why?” he murmured. The rotten food wasn’t a good sign, either. It meant that it had been days, at least, since everything in here had shut down.

  So, where was Kovac? If David had been the kind of man to own a mansion-inside-a-space-station apartment like this…

  “The office is on the top floor,” he said quietly. “With me, Soprano.”

  Whatever the answer was, he suspected he’d find it in Mahometus Kovac’s office.

  The smell was the answer. It wasn’t strong—the suite had space station–grade air filtration systems and its own life support system, after all—but once they were on the third floor of the suite, he picked up the distinct scent in the air and sighed.

  Death and decay were nearly unique. There were other things that smelt like them, he supposed, but they weren’t going to be in a luxury suite in the rotational gravity ring of a space station.

  The smell was enough for David to find the office and push open the door. Wallscreens covered the walls, gray without power or data feeding to them. A massive desk in the center of the room looked like it held enough computer processing power to run a starship, let alone a trading empire.

  Slumped across the desk was Mahometus Kovac, a dark-skinned man with graying hair. There was an ugly exit wound in the back of his skull that matched a smashed hole in one of the wallscreens behind him.

  Stepping around Kovac’s desk, David confirmed his suspicions. The front of the desk had been ripped open to expose the computer cores, and an unfamiliar black slab of electronics had been hooked into both the computers and the suite’s power system.

  Someone had wanted to be very sure that any hidden backup archives in Kovac’s house were destroyed. From the size of the exit wound, they’d even used a hollow-point round to shoot the man, a destructive-enough bullet to make sure any cyberware in his brain was wrecked as well.

  “Thorough,” he said quietly as he knelt next to the slab of electronics and looked it over carefully, without touching it. “Want to bet the only fingerprints on the surge box are Kovac’s?”

  “No bet,” Soprano told him. “He probably installed it himself, as a safety measure.”

  “It’s possible,” David agreed. He rose and looked around the office. “Shot in the head at point-blank range. Suicide?”

  “I’m not a forensics expert, but it at least looks like it. All the security measures intact, all of the computers fucked, one perfectly aimed bullet.” His Mage shrugged. “I don’t buy it, but it looks like it.”

  Looking closer, David confirmed that an old-fashioned semiautomatic pistol was in Kovac’s hand, roughly where it might have fallen if he’d shot himself.

  “No guards,” he pointed out. “Everyone said that Kovac had scary personal security, and they weren’t talking about the robots at the front door that only Indigo knew existed. If he killed himself, he might have sent them away.”

  “He also might have sent them away if he was meeting with someone he didn’t want them to know about,” Soprano said. “Someone he’d trust enough to let through security and meet in his own home. Someone who’d have the chance to walk into his office and shoot him before he could react.”

  “So, either a lover, a friend, or a trusted client,” David said grimly.

  “And fast,” his Mage pointed out. “Either fast enough to shoot him before he did anything or good enough to rearrange the entire scene afterwards.”

  “Hard to fake the bullet wound,” David agreed. “No, they walked through the door and shot him in the center of the forehead before he could move. Not many people in the galaxy who could do that.”

  “Indigo could have.”

  David winced.

  “Yes,” he agreed levelly. “So could an Augment.”

  Both added up, though Indigo’s help in getting them there suggested she hadn’t killed Kovac. A Legatan agent, though…someone who’d been working with Kovac, who Kovac trusted because he’d been instrumental in their plans.

  An agent who’d decided that Kovac was a liability with MISS pulling on the strings from Ardennes. Most likely, Kovac hadn’t even known the agent was an Augment. The cyborgs were built and trained to kill Mages. An unsuspecting gunrunner wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  “Let’s cover our tracks as best we can and get out of here,” David ordered. “However he died, even his records are gone. This whole line of investigation is a damn bust.”

  33

  It was a subdued group that gathered in the meeting room off of Red Falcon’s bridge the next morning. A forensically trained Marine and a grumpy Mage had sufficed to wipe any evidence of their intrusion into Kovac’s home except for the wrecked turrets and door.

  That would, David was sure, leave whatever investigators ended up going through the poor bastard’s home much less likely to accept the neat suicide scenario presented. His people’s forced entrance had been at a completely different time from the murder, but he doubted that the McMurdo Station Police were going to get around to checking out the unexpectedly quiet suite anytime soon.

  “So, this whole stop was a bust,” David repeated to all of his officers. “Kovac is dead, his files wiped, and we’re no closer to tracing the supply of guns than we were when we first got to Ardennes.”

  “We put a lot of fire and blood into finding this man,” Leonhart said quietly. “It’s…frustrating to find him already dead.”

  “He’s been dead since before we left Darius,” Soprano said. “At some point since the revolution on Ardennes, someone decided to clean up loose ends. And this one has been tied off very neatly.”

  “MISS pinged two more leads: one in Amber and one in Sherwood,” David reminded his people. “Kovac was the solidest link we had, and I’m worried we’re not going to find anybody alive, but…”

  “We have to keep yanking on the strings,” Soprano agreed. “Where do we go, then, boss?”

  “Amber has an RTA but Sherwood is closer,” he told them. “We may already be too damned late for anybody, but I’m feeling somewhat rushed at the moment. So, Sherwood it is. Can we get a cargo to Sherwood?”

  He looked at LaMonte, who shrugged back at him.

  “About the only good news is that as soon as I started poking around for brokers, they started materializing out of the woodwork,” she told them. “Even with the dance of me being picky and demanding interviews, I was having problems keeping them at bay. I’m not certain I can get a cargo for Sherwood, but I think we can.”

  “Make it happen,” David ordered. “I don’t think I want to spend an hour longer in this system than I have to.”

  “What about reporting in?” Soprano asked. “If nothing else, I think I want Mars to know just how much of a blind eye the local MISS office is turning to this.”

  “There’s a fleet base at Taurus,” LaMonte pointed out. “They’re not right on the route to Sherwood, but if we Navy-jump it, we can detour there and arrive at Sherwood without anyone knowing better. The base doesn’t have an RTA, but they’ll have couriers.”

  “And they’re only three or four days from the RTA at Kingston,” David agreed. “That’s a good idea. Maria? Are your people up for it?”

  “So long as you don’t ask us to teleport cargo down to the surface at the end, sure,” she confirmed. “We all trained for that to be the standard. I don’t like to push to it unless we need it, but we can do it.”

  “Then let’s make it happen,” David repeated. “I want a cargo lined up for Sherwood ASAP, and us in space in forty-eight hours.”

  He smiled grimly.

  “If nothing else, at this point, we’re relying on the MSPD’s incompetence to av
oid getting in trouble over our breaking and entering, and I have a professional problem with relying on police incompetence.”

  “Hey, skipper, there’s a young lady out here who says she has an appointment with you,” the airlock guard said over the com, a knowing leer in her voice. “She isn’t wearing much, so I’m guessing you want her right up?”

  David sighed and pulled up the video feed from the lock. It was Indigo, all right. Wearing, in this case, an outfit that looked like a black bikini with rose-color frills.

  The woman certainly didn’t have much sense of modesty; that was for sure. The Marine at the door, though, had been there when Indigo had led them to Kovac’s home. Which meant…

  David sighed again, then opened the channel back.

  “You know who she is; stop mugging for the audience and escort her up,” he instructed.

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir!” the Marine replied crisply. Still mugging for the physical and virtual audience who would, hopefully, see this as the Captain having ordered a woman in for the night.

  It was a good thing he never planned on coming back to this system.

  By the time the Marine escorted Indigo into his office, he’d extracted the other half of her payment and placed it inside a small folio. He slid it across his desk to the scantily clad woman as the Marine left them alone.

  “The rest of your payment,” he said quietly.

  “You went in. You came out,” she replied, staring at the folio. “I’m guessing that you found him. What…what happened?”

  Her voice choked with what David suspected was honest emotion. Kovac had apparently been more than a client, if not sufficiently close enough of a friend for her to initially worry when he’d gone dark.

  “Every recording device, record, file and database in his suite was burnt out,” he told her. “We’ll never know for sure. It was rigged up to look like suicide.”