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

by Glynn Stewart

  “Grace McLaughlin,” he greeted her. Once an interviewee for a Ship’s Mage job on his second ship. Once before that, the lover of the Ship’s Mage who’d become a Hand. Now…a starship captain?

  “Captain Grace McLaughlin,” she corrected him, her voice sharp. “You, Captain Rice, have managed to cause me a large degree of trouble just by showing up. Fortunately for you, my grandfather is quite fond of the coffee you brought, so that may help your case.”

  Her sharp tone wasn’t quite what he’d expected from a woman he’d thought had positive opinions of him. On the other hand, she was now a Captain in the new Sherwood Interstellar Patrol. Who knew what that meant?

  As he was thinking that, she stepped into a corner of the room and pressed on a panel he hadn’t realized was there.

  “All right,” she continued, her tone calmer. “All recorders are off, Captain.” She indelicately hopped onto the desk, using its height to level their eyes. Like Damien Montgomery, she was much shorter than David.

  “And why would that be?” he asked carefully.

  “Because I need your MISS papers,” she told him. “Now, Captain.”

  David nodded and tapped a series of commands on his wrist-comp. A file decrypted and bounced to her computer via a secure short-range transmitter.

  She glanced over it and grumbled.

  “This would be enough to get my grandfather off your back,” she told him. “You weren’t going to be in that much trouble, not once I spoke to him. Even he knows he overreacted to your role in Kenneth’s death.”

  “It was a terrible situation all around,” he replied. “How did you know I was MISS?”

  “Your chief of security, Leonhart, I think her name was?” McLaughlin replied. “She made contact with SSS and they bounced her to me. I command Robin Hood, the first of our frigates, but I also run our shore establishment.”

  She shrugged.

  “We’ll need to actually promote someone past Captain to take command of the Patrol shortly. Last I heard, my name was one of two on the list of possibilities. Nepotism, in my opinion, but I’ll do the job if they give it to me.”

  “So, you would be who we’d need to talk to,” David concluded.

  “I also, regardless of promotions, do have the authority to get you out of this room,” she told him. “But it seemed like a good time for us to have a nice private chat that no one was going to question too much. You’re in Sherwood under an MISS warrant, hunting somebody. Gorman, I believe the name was? Why?”

  “That’s classified,” he replied.

  “Yes, and I need to know,” McLaughlin told him levelly. “You may trust my discretion, Captain. More importantly, you have no choice but to trust my discretion. SSS will give you everything if I tell them to…and nothing if I tell them not to. Are we clear?”

  David nodded. Whatever she might think, he figured that second name on the list for the Patrol’s overall commander was probably there for form’s sake as much as anything else. The young woman sitting on the desk in his glorified cell had risen to her challenges and was still rising.

  “Mehrab Gorman crossed our radar as a potential middleman for the supply of arms to the rebellion on Ardennes,” he told her. “I won’t… I can’t tell you who we think the source was, though I imagine you can guess.

  “But we need to track the chain further back—and at least one middleman we did track down is dead.”

  McLaughlin exhaled and nodded thoughtfully.

  “Part of the reason the SSS passed your security chief on to me is that Gorman is ours,” she told him. “Not everything that the Patrol wanted or needed was officially available to us, so we made a deal: we ‘lost’ our files on Gorman and he made sure we got our hands on the gear we needed.”

  “I don’t need to bring him in,” David noted. “I need him to answer some questions, questions he may not want to answer, but I don’t need to arrest him.”

  “You’ll have to find him first,” McLaughlin said. “He’s a collared crook, Captain Rice, so we keep a pretty close eye on him…and he went missing a week ago.”

  “Fuck.”

  David could do the math on that. That was more recently than when Kovac had died, but it lined up with the same methodology. It even lined up with someone taking a ship directly to Sherwood from Condor and moving on the second man.

  “That was my thought, yes,” McLaughlin agreed. “We know he left the station; he has a house on one of the equatorial beaches, and we don’t insist he stay in touch more often than once every day or two. He never made it to the house. Somewhere between his shuttle touching down at Sherwood City and him getting home, he disappeared.”

  “No sign of the man at all?” David asked. “I’m guessing you’re looking for him.”

  “We’re looking,” she confirmed. “SSS has operatives combing the roads, but…no sign so far.”

  David sighed.

  “Can we help?”

  “Unless you have better people than a system security force’s forensics teams, not really,” she pointed out.

  “We have sanction you don’t,” he replied. “Collared crook or not, you need a warrant to rip open his house, don’t you?”

  Grace McLaughlin paused, then sighed.

  “Fair enough. We know he didn’t make it to his home, so we haven’t pushed any of those rules. But you’re counterintelligence, aren’t you?”

  “And I have a general warrant for Gorman,” David told her. “I can kick his door down and tear his house to pieces. If there’s any sign of him or of the data we need, my people can find it.”

  “Your people, yes. Not you,” McLaughlin insisted. “I can funnel a portion of your security team down to the surface, probably your Mage, too, but it’s hard to justify sticking a Captain we just detained and tried to scare the crap out of on one of our shuttles as an ‘honored guest.’”

  David chuckled.

  “Soprano and Leonhart are the better choice, anyway,” he admitted. “My skills have a different focus.”

  37

  The System Security shuttle skimmed over the ocean at breakneck speed as Maria checked her body armor. It had been a while since she’d geared up herself, and she mostly relied on her magic to protect her.

  Today, though, the body armor and its face-concealing helmet were critical to the plan. The SSS crew knew that their passengers were agents of the Martian Interstellar Security Service. They didn’t know who their passengers were, and that was for the best for everyone.

  The shuttle was a Tau Ceti–built stealthed troop transport designed for exactly this role. An actual assault shuttle or atmospheric interceptor would dance rings around it, but it could sneak up on any civilian encampment and catch most civilian atmospheric craft and spacecraft.

  They were going fast enough to leave a wake despite being at least fifty meters above the water, but slowed as they approached their destination. Checking the cameras feeding to her armor’s helmet, Maria recognized the target: a luxurious beachside villa mixing the architectural influences of the last few millennia or so with a master’s touch.

  It wasn’t huge as villas and mansions went, but it was a five-level building that descended down the beach and blended into its surroundings like it had always been there. A small tributary that ran into the ocean there had been incorporated into the structure, a transparent atrium above it forming the central line of the house.

  “I see being a boxed crook pays well,” she murmured.

  “From the files the Patrol gave us, he had the house before they caught him,” Leonhart pointed out. “Considering Kovac’s place? Being a broker for criminal gunrunning pays way better than I expected.”

  “Plotting a career change?” Maria asked as the shuttle swept toward the landing pad behind and above the house.

  “Given that every one of these brokers whose houses we’ve broken into has been dead, I don’t think so,” the Marine replied. “Ground in twenty. Lock and load!”

  They weren’t expecting tr
ouble, and the body armor the Marines and Maria were wearing were relatively standard gear, neither stealth armor nor combat exoskeletons. Most of what Maria’s people were carrying was sensors—but they all also packed MACCAW-9s.

  They inspected those weapons as the shuttle grounded, clearing safeties and checking magazines. The door swung open and the Marines were out first, with Maria and Leonhart right behind them.

  “Keep the bird warm,” Maria told the crew. “I don’t expect to have to leave here in a hurry, but, to be honest, I’m not sure what to expect.”

  The house looked nice enough, but so had Kovac’s apartment. And Kovac’s apartment had contained an automated death trap and a corpse.

  The door leading from the landing pad to the house was unlocked. That was…not what Maria had been expecting. The house was sufficiently isolated to allow most people to rely on seclusion for security, but criminals tended to be more paranoid.

  “Is anyone in there?” she shouted. “We have a warrant and are entering the house!”

  There was no response, and Maria shrugged and shoved the door open to move in. The layout of the house, she quickly realized, was probably a significant part of the security. The combination of glass walls and mirrors made rooms look smaller or larger than they were, probably concealing entire sections of the building if you didn’t already know the layout.

  Their door led into a decorative entryway that resembled nothing so much as a hall of mirrors, extending off into infinity. Gorman, it seemed, had a very distinct style.

  Whoever had put it together for him had been very, very good.

  “Do you smell that?” Leonhart asked softly and Maria looked over at her.

  “No. What?”

  “Death,” the Marine replied. “Let’s move.”

  Maria still had no idea what Leonhart was smelling, but she followed the Marine down the stairs to the middle floor—and into the leftovers of a clearly unexpected fight.

  Nobody lived in the house while Gorman was gone, but clearly somebody visited to clean and upkeep the place—and feed the dogs. Four large black animals were crumpled in heaps around the main atrium, along with a young man they’d clearly been attempting to protect.

  “Check them,” Maria ordered grimly. The atrium would have been gorgeous normally, with a burbling brook and living trees surrounding an expensive set of comfortable-looking living room furniture. The dead animals and youth ruined the ambience.

  A Marine stepped over the youth, kneeling over the body with a scanner for half a minute before reaching down to gently close the staring eyes.

  “Shot in the head,” the Marine reported. “Not at close range, no flash burns.” He shook his head. “Perfect shot, from over there.” He gestured. The only stairway in that direction was at least four or five meters away.

  “Augment,” Leonhart concluded sadly, looking over the dogs herself. “The dogs smelled a stranger, tried to get the caretaker out of the room. He didn’t realize there was a threat, tried to get them under control, and attracted attention. Intruder walked in and shot them all.”

  “Given everything else, I would have expected them to clean up,” Maria noted.

  “Probably panicked, figuring someone would come to check in on the missing person.” Leonhart stood up. “How long, Naheed?”

  “Five days,” the Marine replied. “There probably is a missing-person report out, but no one has gone far enough to start kicking down the doors of his clients. I doubt Gorman was the only person the kid was taking care of pets for.”

  “Fuck.” Maria glared around the room. “Scan the place for computers—and appliances. I have a bad damn feeling about this.”

  The scans confirmed what she was expecting. She hadn’t noticed it before, as the house was built to use as much natural light as possible, but all of the electronics were down. Someone had cut external power and then overloaded the internal circuit, much as had been done in Kovac’s apartment.

  It was clean, effective, and professional, but combined with the bodies and Red Falcon’s encounters in Condor, it set a pattern. Someone, almost certainly a covert Augment agent from Legatus, had been tying up loose ends.

  Maria doubted they were going to find the contact in Amber alive, either. Someone had been very thorough, and while they could try to trace back the murderer, she didn’t expect them to have much luck.

  It was easy to assume Legatans, too, but they had no proof. The never-ending story of MISS’s shadow conflict. They believed they knew who the enemy was…but they didn’t even have proof they would trust, let alone that they could take to the government.

  “Rhianna, when the Patrol said he never arrived home, did they track him or did he not check in?” Maria asked as she looked up and down the atrium “spine” of the house.

  “He didn’t check in,” Leonhart replied. “He was apparently checking in every twelve hours or so and had a remotely activatable tracker on his wrist-comp. He may have dumped the comp and disappeared on his own, but…they couldn’t find the comp at all.”

  Which didn’t rule out Gorman making a run for it, Maria supposed, but it fit with the pattern they were seeing.

  “Let’s check his office,” she ordered. “And sweep the damn house. This place was built to hide secret rooms. I’m guessing there’s at least something in here he didn’t want anyone to find.”

  The main office was a gleaming room of chrome and wallscreens and lies. It was too sterile, too clean. Nothing about the room even suggested that it has been personalized, and Maria looked around it with faint distaste.

  “This might be where he met people,” she allowed. “But it wasn’t where he worked. How’s that mapping going?”

  “From what I’m seeing, I’m guessing about a quarter of the house is hidden,” Leonhart replied. “Plus, I would bet the damn Falcon herself that there’s an entire floor under the house that isn’t accessed by any visible means.

  “Finding all of this house’s secrets could take a while.”

  “Well, can we at least confirm there’s no computers in there?” Maria asked. “That would render finding them, well, useless.”

  “I don’t know,” Leonhart admitted. “It wouldn’t take much shielding to make it impossible to tell if you had computer equipment hidden in the secret rooms, and almost none if you buried the underground section well enough.”

  Maria studied the room around her contemplatively.

  “How far does our warrant stretch?” she asked.

  “Um. We could basically dismantle the building brick by brick,” Leonhart told her. “Why?”

  “Because that’s basically what I’m planning. Hold one.”

  She was done being patient. Magic flared around her hand, lighting up the two runes on her right palm—the rune that interfaced with the simulacrum to jump a starship and the projector rune that made it significantly easier to use her magic as a weapon. She gathered heat and force for a moment as she studied the room.

  Then she obliterated a meter-wide hole in all four walls with a gesture. The Marine standing guard outside the office looked through the hole at her with some distress, but she flashed the woman a thumbs-up.

  Two of the walls led into the rooms she expected. One linked to the atrium, one to the master bedroom. The bedroom at least looked like it was actually used…and it also shared a wall with the space the fourth hole revealed.

  Tucked away and concealed by mirrors on all sides was a room that was completely contrary to the luxurious décor of the rest of the house. The walls were plain steel, made of panels that would probably slide aside at a verbal command if the house computers were working.

  A large wooden desk took up the center of the room, its exterior paneling dismantled to allow someone to get at the computer cores within. There was no body in this office, but it otherwise resembled where they’d found Kovac—someone had found the central computer nexus and linked in an EMP bomb to be very sure they’d got all of Gorman’s files.

  “Well, som
eone was very thorough,” Maria said grimly. “Start knocking down walls, Leonhart. I want to know every secret Gorman left here. I don’t know if we’ll find any answers…but we’ve run out of other places to look.”

  Maria spent most of the search half-expecting to find Gorman’s body, but wherever the smuggler had died or been kidnapped to, he hadn’t been left for dead in his own home.

  He also hadn’t, despite what they’d expected, been using his home as a staging depot. There was an underground level, exactly as Leonhart had expected, but it looked more like a museum than a storage facility.

  Here, it appeared, was where the gunrunner had stored the more esoteric and strange finds he’d acquired over his career. There was a pair of blasters—one-shot compressed-plasma guns that made great portable anti-tank weapons. There were over twenty combat exosuits going back almost two hundred years of the evolution of the technology.

  Swords, guns, armor—the room was a treasure trove of the strange, the fascinating, and the lethal.

  And then, at the very back, Maria found Gorman’s last secret, the one that even the Patrol would probably have broken their promise of clemency over. They almost missed it as they ran their flashlights through the dark room, thinking that it was just another exosuit…and then Maria realized it was halfway across the room and refocused her light.

  “What in all bloody hells is that?” she barked as she studied the mechanical troll occupying the entire far wall. At least five meters tall, the war machine had four legs and six “arms”—two with hands and four with an assortment of weaponry.

  Leonhart swallowed audibly as her own light shone on it.

  “That should not exist,” she said flatly. “It’s a United Nations ODD—Orbital Drop Dreadnought. They were ASI-driven war machines that they built to drop into ‘strategic target zones’ on Mars during the Eugenics Wars.”

  Maria swallowed.

  Artificial Sequential Intelligences were self-learning, heuristic algorithms. They weren’t smart—they got called “artificial stupids” a lot—but if well coded, they could do a lot of things. She still wouldn’t have trusted a modern one, even written by Kelly LaMonte, whose skills she trusted, to distinguish between civilian and combatant.