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

by Glynn Stewart

  Plus, he had other talents too, and she purred at him as she plastered herself against his side to taste the spoonful of soup he offered her.

  “Mmm. That’s good. What is it?”

  “Something the Sherwood folks call Scotch broth,” he told her. “Lamb, barley, carrots. It’s our starter, with a ground mutton pie for the entrée.”

  She chuckled.

  “You spoil us.”

  “Hey, to be clear, I bought the pie before we left,” Mike confessed. “I can make soup from scratch. Pie is way beyond me.”

  “You should have asked me,” Xi interjected as the door slid shut behind the petite Asian Mage. “Meat pie is out of my experience, but I make a mean fruit tart.”

  Xi slipped through into the kitchen, still in her shipsuit, and stole kisses from both of the pair hovering over the soup. She had her own moment of pleased appreciation of Kelly’s robe, sending another warm tingle down to the XO’s toes.

  “The soup is ready, if you two want to grab a seat,” Mike told them. “I hate to even suggest it, love, but that robe probably won’t protect you from hot soup!”

  Kelly laughed.

  “All right, all right, I’ll change,” she promised. That took only a minute, and she rejoined the other pair as Mike served up the soup. Xi had changed as well, both of them ending up in matching light shorts and tops perfect for the ship’s carefully moderate temperature.

  The Mage seemed nervous but focused on the soup. Kelly didn’t see any reason to prod her lover and did the same.

  After the savory broth had vanished, Xi waved a hand at Mike before he could do more than gather up the bowls.

  “Hang on a moment, love,” she instructed. Obediently, the fair-haired pilot retook his seat and turned a patiently adoring gaze on her.

  Kelly chuckled. The way Mike looked at Xi also warmed her heart. She was very, very lucky.

  Xi, on the other hand, looked nervous, and Kelly’s humor began to fade as her heart started to race. What was up?

  “Sorry, just steeling my nerve,” Xi told them. “I spent a lot of time thinking about us over the last few weeks, as we get tied up again and again in explosions and gun smuggling, and I decided there was something I needed to do.

  “Then, well, details took a while,” she said with a smile.

  Xi removed a mid-sized flat box of Sherwood oak from her pocket and laid it on the table. Kelly stared at it, wondering just what the Mage had found for several seconds, until Xi popped it open with a gesture and a whiff of magic.

  The inside of the box was lined with velvet and contained three matching rings of braided metal in three different sizes, and Kelly inhaled sharply.

  “Three metals,” Xi said quietly. “Copper for Kelly, our engineer and electronics whiz. Titanium for Mike, our pilot and fighter. Gold for me, the Mage and the girliest.” She grinned as she said that.

  “They all match. They should fit. So…um.” She swallowed, the grin shifting.

  “Will you marry me?” she asked. “And, well, each other? All of us? Together?”

  Kelly took the mid-sized ring from the box with gently shocked hands, turning it in the light with awe and then closing one eye to look through the ring at Xi Wu. The other woman was looking at her with wide, nervous eyes, and Kelly winked through the ring.

  “Yes,” she told her lover. “Yes, I’ll marry you. And him.” She gestured to Mike, who was still sitting and staring at the rings in shock. “Assuming he finds his voice sometime this week.”

  Mike coughed and shook himself.

  “I am…so unbelievably lucky,” he breathed. “Yes, I’ll marry you both. Gods, how crazy do you think I am?”

  They ambushed Captain Rice the next morning, as he was settling into his command chair with a cup of coffee and reviewing the inevitably blank bridge screens while they were in the middle of deep space.

  “XO,” he greeted Kelly, then looked at her companions. “First Pilot. Mage.” He shook his head. “Or perhaps, from the looks of it, I should be greeting Kelly, Mike, and Xi?”

  Kelly was relatively sure none of them could wipe the silly grins off their faces. That, combined with the three of them showing up as one and the fact that ship captains retained their ancient legal rights, almost certainly told him what they wanted.

  “Xi decided to finally jump the gun on Mike and me,” she told her boss, then held out her hand with the ring. “She asked us to marry her and we both said yes. We were wondering—well, hoping, really—that you’d be willing to perform the ceremony for us.”

  He smiled at the three of them.

  “With absolute pleasure,” he agreed instantly. “Should we be planning on going somewhere soon to get your families involved?”

  That had been part of the discussions that had kept the three of them up late the last night.

  “We talked about it,” Mike said when Kelly didn’t reply immediately. “My family is ship’s crew, so we’re pretty scattered. Xi’s is back on Mars.”

  “And, frankly, won’t be happy with my marrying non-Mages, so wouldn’t show up anyway,” Xi Wu added.

  “This ship, this crew—they’re our family,” Kelly told the Captain. “They’re all we’d want.”

  “We have a couple of days left before we reach Java,” he said after a moment’s thought. “If you want to jump on it right now, we can arrange things for tomorrow? Give yourselves time to find clothes and the rest of the ship time to put together food and some decorations.”

  He grinned.

  “You won’t get much in terms of gifts with the lack of warning, but I figure that’s not the point.”

  “Not in the slightest,” Kelly agreed. “I just want to make sure this pair doesn’t get away!”

  41

  Pulling together a wedding on a day or so of notice would have been a nightmare anywhere in the galaxy. On a starship, though, there was only so much that could be done, so it came together with surprising ease.

  Maria took over the organizing as soon as Rice told her what was happening. The Captain had other things on his mind, and it certainly wasn’t right for LaMonte to organize her own wedding!

  She’d found food, got James Kellers to fabricate linens—it wasn’t the usual use of the fabric shop aboard the ship, but it was certainly possible—and pulled Nguyen and Barrow into a three-person magical sweep of the mess hall.

  They’d also made sure that Xi had the last thirty-six hours of the trip off. They couldn’t give the trio much in terms of a honeymoon, but if the other three Mages were willing to take on Navy six-hour rotations instead of merchant-shipping eight-hour rotations, they could give her a day off.

  It all came together with speed and grace, and Maria found herself in the front row of the mess hall, watching David Rice wait for three of the ship’s senior officers to walk up the aisle of hastily magically cleaned floor.

  There was no one to give any of them away, and the questions of precedence were always dangerous ones, but Maria had had a moment of inspiration.

  As the sound system started to play an old classical piano tune, James Kellers walked into the room with Rhianna Leonhart at his side. Both of them were in full merchant navy uniform, a formal outfit rarely seen outside of exactly this kind of affair.

  The pair made it three-quarters of the way down the aisle, then turned to face each other and stepped back to clear a space between them. A second pair, this time fully dress-uniformed Marines, followed them. Another set of Marines took up the last marker, the three pairs forming a formal guard.

  The piano music picked up the pace, and the three spouses-to-be walked into the room arm in arm. Any appearance of the two young women locking arms behind Mike Kelzin to drag him to the altar was entirely coincidental, Maria hoped—and the shocked silly grin on his face suggested she was right.

  They’d pulled together another merchant officer’s white dress uniform for Kelzin, and both girls had gone for floor-length red gowns that offset the stark white of their husband-to-b
e perfectly.

  The guards fell in behind them, two by two, as they stepped up to the front, where Rice waited for them with a massive grin on his face.

  “Welcome, everyone,” he told the gathered crew. “This is a rare honor and privilege for me, though I doubt it’s a day any of us are surprised to see. Today, we are gathered to see these three bound together in a formal recognition of their marriage and union, before the assembled eyes of us, their shipmates, and the laws and many varied Gods of humankind…”

  Maria wasn’t the type to cry at weddings, but the whole affair certainly left her feeling more than a little bit sappy. Everyone had spent the last couple of years watching the three young officers dance through the complicated dance of their relationship, and it was good to see them decide to stick together.

  Their current career didn’t leave them with much certainty for the future, but at least those three now had each other. Even if, after several abortive attempts to dance with all three of them, they’d started switching up partners for each dance as the music continued to play.

  “All right, James,” Maria told the chief engineer. “Let’s get out there.”

  He didn’t even grumble as she dragged him out onto the dance floor. They hadn’t been concerned about keeping their new relationship secret, but they’d exercised a degree of discretion. Dancing at the younger officers’ wedding with her head on his shoulder was significantly less discreet than that.

  No one seemed particularly surprised, though.

  “Guess we were less quiet than we thought,” he murmured in her ear as he held her close.

  “It’s a small ship and we’re all basically family,” she replied. “No one knows what happens next. Every system we walk into could be a trap. Everyone needs to find what happiness they can.”

  She wasn’t entirely sure what the content rumble of agreement from James could be described as, but it sent warm shivers down her spine.

  “Wedding’s not giving you ideas, is it?” he asked.

  “Ha!” she laughed. “Bit soon for ideas for you and me, isn’t it? We can let things be for a while yet.”

  “Oh, good,” he told her. “I can make a lot of things with what I’ve got on this ship, but a ring worthy of you isn’t one of them.”

  That sent another warm shiver down her spine, and she leaned a bit more heavily against him.

  “Be careful, you big lug,” she said warmly into his ear. “I might start to actually like you if you keep being that much of a sap.”

  “Oh, I’ll get over it as soon as you need me to fix a starship or something minor like that,” he replied brightly. “I’m sure we’ll make things work.”

  It was lightly said and yet carried such conviction and confidence that it actually struck Maria dumb for a moment. He was right. Neither of them was young. They’d been through their batterings and bruisings, and they had a better idea of what they were getting into.

  They really could make this work. He was joking about a ring…but it was in that moment that Maria knew that if he decided to offer her one, she would take it.

  And probably turn it into a wedding about as fast as LaMonte had. Like the XO with her pilot and Mage, she wanted to make sure this one didn’t get away.

  Whatever happened next.

  42

  Kelly LaMonte couldn’t help humming happily to herself as Red Falcon flashed into the Java System. There wasn’t that much difference between being with Mike and Xi and being married to them…and yet it was enough to keep a solid core of warmth in her stomach and chest.

  Warmth summed up the Java System, too. Java itself was on the hot end of stars likely to produce habitable worlds, a large F-class sun that had burned most of its interior worlds to cinders. Espresso was the fifth planet out and still uncomfortably warm for humans.

  It was comfortably warm to its energetic ocean and jungle life, however. Much of the value in the system came from the pharmaceuticals harvested from those jungles. The rest came from the gems and crystals formed in the superheated magma fields of those four half-molten lava balls orbiting inside Espresso.

  There was more sublight traffic than in most MidWorlds, but Kelly picked out only a handful of other starships. Two more freighters and one obnoxiously golden private jump-yacht.

  “Well, welcome to UnArcana space,” Rice said from behind her. “If this is the last time I bring a crew of Mages into one of these systems, I’ll breathe a sigh of relief when we leave.”

  “You’ll do that anyway,” Kelly replied as she continued to collate data. “Jeeves, can you double-check contact sixty-two?”

  The tactical officer whistled quietly.

  “Well. I know we’ve met the Golden Bears and their ‘monitors,’ but as a student of naval history, let me tell you: that thing is much closer to what the original ships were intended for!”

  The contact in question was big. She was big for a starship, let alone a sublight ship, and her orbit and energy signatures suggested she didn’t have a simulacrum chamber. Massing four million tons and six hundred meters long, it looked like she packed a lot of lasers and missile launchers.

  “There’s another one,” Kelly pointed out. “And another?”

  “I make it four in total,” Jeeves replied. “Transponder are identifying them as ‘guardships’ of the Java Self-Defense Force.” He paused. “Looking closer, it looks like they’ve got spinning hab rings on their ‘bottom’ sides. I’m guessing their combat tactics include some strict instructions on ‘this end towards enemy?’”

  “It is an UnArcana World,” Rice said. “They don’t have Mages, so no gravity runes. Ring stations and spinning hab sections for everyone.”

  “We’re also seeing a bunch of gunships,” Kelly reported. “Either Legatan-built or Legatan-designed. Who do they think is going to attack here?”

  “Mars,” her Captain said grimly. “I.e., us.”

  “Wonderful.” She shook her head. “Sending in the request for a docking port and approach vector.”

  They didn’t have much of a cargo, but they had some and they had the contract for the pickup for the Patrol. They’d see what they could find out.

  “I’ve got incoming on the screens,” Jeeves announced. “Clever buggers—pair of gunships on ballistic orbits that just lit off their drives.”

  “Hail them,” Rice ordered. “We’re not here to start a fight.”

  “Channel open,” Kelly replied.

  “JSDF ships, this is Captain Rice aboard Red Falcon,” he introduced himself. “We are here under contract from the government of the Sherwood System and are carrying approximately one point two megatons of cargo for delivery.

  “I’m attaching our IDs and paperwork. Please advise if you need anything else from us.”

  They waited.

  “They’re coming in fast,” Jeeves reported. “Still burning our way at four gees. Without gravity runes, they can only do that for so long.” He swallowed. “We’re being pinged with targeting radar, sir.”

  “Charge the guns,” Rice ordered. “No targeting radar of our own. We’re being tested, I think.”

  Seconds turned to minutes as the gunships flung themselves across the void of space. Kelly studied them. Falcon could obliterate them in a heartbeat, but not before they fired. Two dozen antimatter missiles was a threat they could overcome…probably.

  On the other hand, everyone would prefer that Red Falcon not get into a fight with the local authorities. She just didn’t know what the buggers were playing at.

  “They’re breaking off,” Jeeves suddenly reported. “Timing is about right for them to have relayed your transmission in-system and got a response from authorities in Espresso orbit.”

  Rice sighed.

  “We did message the orbitals, right?”

  “Of course,” Kelly confirmed. “They just decided to poke us first.” She checked her systems as a light flashed.

  “Incoming message.”

  “Play it,” Rice ordered in a tired voic
e.

  “Red Falcon, this is Commander Deuce of the JSDF,” the audio-only transmission informed him. “We have scanned your ship and you are carrying a lot of guns for a merchant vessel. Per our authority under the charter, we are ordering you to adjust your course for zero velocity relative to Espresso at a minimum of two million kilometers distance.

  “Contact with the planet and cargo delivery may be carried out by cargo shuttles and small craft, but you are not to approach the planet closer than two million kilometers. Disobedience to these orders will be met with lethal force.”

  The transmission ended, and Kelly looked back at her boss with concern.

  “Adjust our course to comply, XO,” he ordered. “And send your new husband my apologies. His people are about to have one of the shittiest weeks of their careers.”

  Two million kilometers was a blatantly arbitrary line in space. Kelly knew it. Her boss knew it. Even the locals had to know it. From the orbit they settled into, two million kilometers “behind” Espresso, they could obliterate every space station in orbit with their lasers or even fire missiles into the atmosphere.

  Of course, neither the targeting computers nor the missiles themselves would cooperate with being fired into atmosphere. The failsafes could be disabled, but Kelly suspected there were layers of mechanical and software failsafes she didn’t even know about to prevent their space-to-space missiles being used as bombardment weapons.

  “Even at five gravities, which is going to suck aboard the shuttles, let’s be clear, that’s a three-and-a-half-hour flight each way,” Kelzin noted on the channel. “Do we take the cargo straight in or do we go over and clarify delivery and everything first?”

  “Pull one of the personnel shuttles,” Kelly told her husband. “Run…the Captain and Leonhart over first. Let Rice sort out the details while we load our cargo into the heavy shuttles.”