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

by Glynn Stewart

  “And what purpose is His Protectorate if we do not protect people?” Verona said quietly.

  35

  Kelly held the midnight watch alone as Red Falcon drifted through deep space, halfway between Taurus and Sherwood. The ship was quiet, even her massive engines silent as she waited for the Mages to work their spells and carry her farther through space.

  Once, they’d thought deep space was inviolate, a safe zone where no one could follow them. They’d been regularly disabused of that notion, sadly. Anyone who knew your route could intercept you with a little luck. Trackers, that rare breed of not-Mages-but-still-magical individuals, could follow a jump with laser precision.

  Her job was literally to keep watch and to hit the alert if something jumped into the forgotten chunk of space they occupied. It was a good time to catch up on her reading, which for Kelly ranged from periodicals around management and shipping economics to engineering textbooks to advice books on keeping together polyamorous relationships.

  Every time they traveled through a system, her to-be-read pile expanded. She didn’t get much time to read.

  One of the things she’d started to keep an eye on was the “starting price” of a small jump freighter. She’d attached her star to David Rice and MISS for now, but after two years aboard Red Falcon, she was starting to wonder where she went from there.

  A Venice-class ship like the old Blue Jay hauled three million tons of cargo, and the main restriction on its speed was how many Mages you put aboard her. Three-megaton ships like that were the backbone of the Protectorate’s economy, but they were also well out of the range she could imagine financing.

  Without help from Captain Rice, help she hesitated to ask for, her range didn’t even stretch to the kind of small one-megaton ship that either ran with multiple Mages as a fast packet or, well, ran routes nobody else cared about.

  Time would change that. Time or, well, help from Captain Rice. Or potentially MISS, if Kelly was willing to tie her future to the intelligence agency. She was, officially, a mid-ranking MISS agent, after all.

  The realities of the situation were somewhat more…fluid. Red Falcon’s senior crew had been brought aboard as a group. She had an MISS rank and a stack of MISS training, but her membership in the organization was still really via David Rice.

  She could change that, Kelly supposed, but that would require her to truly make intelligence and counterintelligence her career.

  It would also require leaving Red Falcon behind, and that wasn’t a decision she could make without talking to Wu and Kelzin. No one had been talking rings or marriage yet, but she certainly wasn’t planning on going anywhere without that pair.

  Soft footsteps caught her attention, and she looked up to see Captain Rice entering the bridge.

  “Captain,” she greeted him. “It’s a bit late, isn’t it?”

  As a practical matter, the ship’s day operated on “the captain is up,” but that also aligned relatively well with the usual Olympus Mons Time used by stations and spaceships, at least aboard Red Falcon.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Rice admitted gruffly. “How’s the watch?”

  Kelly gestured expansively at the empty screens.

  “We are, if my astrography is half as good as I think it is, about seven light-years from the nearest inhabited system and probably about as far from the nearest human,” she pointed out. “It’s quiet. A time to think and read.”

  He chuckled and glanced over her shoulder.

  “Used-starship listings, huh?” he asked. “Leaving us already?”

  “Listings” was an exaggeration. There had been exactly two starships for sale in Taurus, and Kelly wouldn’t have bought one there anyway.

  “Researching,” she told him. “Trying to work out where I go from here.” She shrugged. “If it was more than research, I’d be talking about it with the others.”

  “You don’t have to bring your lovers on your ship with you,” Rice observed, “though I’ll admit that having them on different ships makes things impossible.”

  He looked sad at that thought, and Kelly wondered just what had wrecked the Captain’s half-mythical first marriage.

  “I’d rather keep them around,” she told her boss. “So, it’s a factor.”

  “Didn’t say it shouldn’t be, just that it didn’t need to be,” he replied. “If that’s your plan, work with it. There’s worse people to bring with you than a top-tier pilot and Mage, that’s for sure.”

  “You’re not…bothered?” she asked.

  Rice chuckled.

  “Kelly, like any other student, XOs move on. It was actually a concern for me that it took so long to get Jenna onto her own ship. I never ended up having the resources to buy her one until MISS got involved, and she didn’t have the ambition to try and pull together investors herself.” He shrugged. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be XO; some people don’t want the responsibility and risk of running a ship they own.”

  Jenna Campbell now commanded Peregrine—as Rice’s employee, yes, but Captain of her own ship. There was still a lot less risk in commanding someone else’s ship than in owning your own…but Kelly wanted her own.

  “I like being XO,” she told the Captain. “But…yeah, I want my own ship.”

  “There’s more possibilities than one for that,” he pointed out. “You’ve blown away every MISS training course you’ve taken. Red Falcon is, in many ways, not a particularly covert covert ship. At this point, we could almost certainly get Mars to give you a ship, let you pick your own crew. Who knows what they’d want you to do, but they’d probably be grumpier to see you go than I would be!”

  “I’m not sure I want to make this my life,” she admitted.

  “Neither am I,” her Captain said with a chuckle. “Once we’re done chasing this chain of guns, though, we’ll head back to Tau Ceti to take a breather. I’ll back you for whatever play you want to make—if you want to stay on Red Falcon a while longer, I’ll be glad to keep you. If you want an MISS ship, I’ll back you. If you want to buy your own, I’ll help you put together a syndicate of investors.”

  She inhaled sharply.

  “That’s a hell of an open-ended offer, boss,” she told him as she tried to wrap her brain around it. Rice helping her put together a syndicate of investors would inevitably require him to put up a good chunk of the money himself and likely guarantee the rest of the loans.

  Kelly would be indebted to him beyond the strict dollar value…but she’d still own her ship and be in charge.

  “The last woman I was exec for made me the same one, without the MISS component,” he told her. “She helped me put together my first investment syndicate and buy a third-tier Classical-class two-megaton ship.” Rice shook his head. “Gods, was she a hunk of junk, but she held together long enough for me to put together the funds to buy Blue Jay.

  “Think about it,” he instructed.

  “What do you think I should do?” Kelly asked.

  “I can’t tell you that,” he replied. “I think you’d make a damn good covert ops commander, better than me by a long shot. But I think we could swing you a three- or four-megaton mid-sized freighter pretty easily.

  “Think about it,” he echoed. “And go rest. I have the watch.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  Her thanks were for far more than just taking over the rest of her shift.

  36

  “Welcome back to Sherwood, everyone,” David said with forced cheer as the jump flare faded. “Everyone has fond memories, I hope?”

  He forced a bitter-sounding chuckle as he said that.

  The last time he’d visited Sherwood, the youngest child of the McLaughlin had died teleporting David and Blue Jay safely away from a pirate attack to safety there. He’d delivered Kenneth McLaughlin’s body to his father…and been banned from the system.

  The consequences of that had been messy, but the end result had been that he’d picked up Mage Damien Montgomery as his replacement Ship’s Mage.
The consequences of that recruitment had in many ways been messier and farther-reaching.

  On the other hand, without Damien Montgomery, David Rice would be dead. He was okay with the trade.

  “Well, not much has changed,” LaMonte noted. “Still has the one big stick with rings on it for an orbital, though… Yeah, those are new.”

  David’s XO flagged a new set of stations orbiting above Sherwood Prime. Like Prime itself, they were an idiosyncratic local design…but like Prime, he recognized their purpose.

  “Shipyards? That’s…a hell of an investment.”

  “And there’s the return,” Jeeves told him. “Looks like three ships, three-quarters-scale cruisers.”

  “Three yards, finished with ships under construction in them,” LaMonte reported. “Three more under construction; their second tranche of ships will probably all start at the same time.”

  “What are those things?” David asked, studying the ships. They were big bastards for what were obviously Militia warships, six million tons apiece and with a sweeping organic design quite contrary to the usual Martian structure.

  “At a guess? Pirate-killers,” Jeeves said. “If you’re worried your local pirates are going to get their hands on destroyers or even just a flotilla of jump-corvettes, well, you want something that can eat that for lunch without getting hurt in the process.”

  “Anything in our files on them?” David said.

  “Just a note that Sherwood was founding a new anti-piracy force, the Sherwood Interstellar Patrol,” LaMonte told him. “I guess they were taking it a lot more seriously than MISS thought they were.”

  “Those aren’t civilian-designed floating wrecks like Stellarite’s ships, either,” Jeeves pointed out. “Just from what I can see, they’ve got antimatter drives and modern sensors. Probably the missiles and beams to back them up, too. I wouldn’t bet on them versus, say, an equal tonnage of Navy ships, but they look like competently built ships.”

  “And competently commanded ones,” David murmured, watching as the closest of the three ships adjusted her vector. The big new ship wasn’t on an intercept course for Red Falcon—she was leaving that to a sublight corvette that was much closer to them—but she was in position to back up the corvette.

  In fact…David checked the numbers. If the Patrol ship was carrying the Phoenix VIIs the Protectorate authorized for System Militia use, they would be able to land missile hits on Falcon before Falcon could hit the corvette with lasers.

  It was a very well-arranged interception pattern that made the best use of their limited resources.

  “Send our bona fides in-system and request an approach pattern and docking port with Prime,” David ordered. “We have cargo to deliver, and then, well, we need to find this Mehrab Gorman.”

  Sherwood Prime had its downsides and upsides, in David’s opinion. Its biggest downside, of course, was being the poor bastard trying to dock with one of the rings close to the center of the “stick.” With twelve spinning ring sections providing artificial gravity, docking with any of them was a pain. Docking with the central ones, with spinning sections on both sides, was a nightmare.

  Fortunately, a ship of Red Falcon’s size had to dock at the end, where there was only the zero-gravity core. Unlike many stations, Sherwood Prime had no artificial gravity runes to make ship access easier, which was another downside.

  Prime’s big upside was that it concentrated all of the transshipping, cargo loading, ship repairs, and orbital residential space into a single massive platform. Putting a quarter of a million people in one space station allowed for significant economies of scale, but most systems didn’t have the foresight or cash to build an orbital as large as Sherwood had as their first space station.

  Leonhart escorted him to the ship boarding tube, the Marine looking curious.

  “First time to Sherwood?” he asked.

  “Yup,” she confirmed. “I’ve seen some big stations, but this one is pushing it for the MidWorlds.”

  “Sherwood has a lot of things the Core Worlds want, even if most of it is luxury goods,” he pointed out. “They do a good job of using that money, and the system cops are good.”

  “Think they’ll have files on Gorman?” Leonhart asked.

  “If anyone does,” he confirmed. “Do what you need to, Chief. If that’s hack their files, that’s probably preferable, but we might have more luck flashing badges here. SSS are good.”

  Hacking McMurdo Station’s police databases had been one thing. Hacking Sherwood System Security…yeah. David wasn’t taking bets on his Marines succeeding.

  “We’re better off playing nice, are we?” Leonhart asked.

  “It’s your call, Rhianna,” David told her. “Whatever it takes.”

  She sighed.

  “I know that tone,” she replied. “We’ll sneak in and show some badges. If they’re as good as you think, there’s got to be at least one quiet office no one is watching.”

  “All right. I need some escorts to go meet our cargo broker,” he said. “I’ll leave making friends with the local cops to you.”

  Leonhart laughed.

  “I’ll send Binici with you,” she told him. “If I’m not hacking their systems, I don’t need her for this.”

  The disadvantage of the kind of brokered cargo that David had brought to Sherwood was that there was no single point of contact. He had eight point four million tons of cargo—eight hundred and forty-three ten-thousand-ton containers—and just over six hundred deliveries.

  The biggest cargo was a hundred and twenty containers of coffee beans. At the other end of the scale, ten containers held no less than one hundred and seventy separate cargos. Back when he’d been barely making ends meet on Blue Jay, he and Jenna had handled all of the individual cargos themselves.

  “Barely making ends meet” meant something very different for a starship captain than most, but it had been tight enough that a one percent brokerage fee could cut their reserve in half. Now, though, Red Falcon delivered cargos in a quarter of the time Blue Jay had. She charged the same amount per ton-light-year and only cost twice as much to run.

  Plus, even half-empty, she was delivering three times as much cargo as his old ship. He not only could hire a broker to handle this end of the deal, he had to.

  Leaving the office of the man he’d engaged to take care of that project, the last thing he expected was a quartet of grim-faced Sherwood System Security officers staring down his bodyguards. They weren’t heavily armed…but they were the law here unless he chose to blow his cover.

  “Captain David Rice?” one of them said sharply.

  “That would be me,” he confirmed carefully.

  “We’ll need you to come with us,” the officer told him.

  “What is this about?” David asked. “Am I being arrested? For what?”

  “Whether or not you are being arrested is to be established at a later point,” the officer said formally. “You are being detained for violation of a directed executive order from the Governor, which requires you to be brought before an appropriate authority.”

  “Captain?” Binici asked slowly. “What did you do?”

  David swallowed. He hadn’t actually expected the order to still hold.

  “I came back to Sherwood,” he admitted. “The McLaughlin told me to never come back again after his son died on my old ship.”

  “And that order was entered in the formal records,” the SSS officer confirmed. “So, I repeat. You are being detained. Are you going to make a fuss?”

  “May my escort accompany me?” he asked.

  “For now,” the officer told him. “You may also contact your ship to let them know what’s happening. Further communication once you reach the station will be at the discretion of higher authority than I.”

  The worst that the McLaughlin could do for something like this was kick him out of the system, which would be hell for their cargo-delivery contracts but not insurmountable…for their official business.

&nbs
p; There was no way he could find Mehrab Gorman if the Governor kicked him out. His MISS codes could probably avoid that, but that was going to be more trouble than he wanted.

  “I’ll let my XO and Ship’s Mage know immediately,” he told the officer, but sighed. “I see no other choice; I will of course comply.”

  The Security officers were polite enough and he managed to at least dodge a cell. He was separated from Binici and her team and put inside what was probably a visitor’s office. Office or no, it still had a lock and he heard it click shut behind him.

  The console at the desk was designed to interface with a wrist-comp, and his didn’t have the codes. Depending on what software they’d used, he might have an MISS override that would get him in, but that would give away more than it would help.

  He settled into the chair and considered the situation. He hadn’t forgotten that he’d been ordered to never come back, but most of the time, that kind of order was more bluster than anything else. He should have known better to expect bluster from the McLaughlin.

  Miles James McLaughlin was the patriarch of his clan and had been elected Mage-Governor of Sherwood eight times now. He didn’t bluff. He didn’t bluster. When he issued orders and commands, he meant them.

  David suspected that the SSS officers, at least, expected that David would be released pretty quickly. It was a four-year-old order now, and even Governor McLaughlin didn’t hold grudges that long. By locking him up, they were making a point and trying to scare him.

  They were probably doing him a favor. If the Governor found out he was there without there being some kind of consequence, it might have ended up biting him in the ass.

  His morose thoughts were interrupted by the door unlocking and someone stepping in. The stranger was a petite redheaded woman in an unfamiliar dark blue uniform with insignia of a single gold circle. If she was using RMN patterns, this was a full Captain…and then he recognized her.