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

by Glynn Stewart

  “That’s a good plan,” Rice said as he stepped up behind her. “I’ll take a few of the security troops as well; we’ll stay on the station while everything gets sorted out. Unless they have the crystals to hand already, we’re going to be sitting like this for a few days at least.”

  “Hopefully, they’ll eventually let us dock,” she replied. “Seven hours’ flight there and back is going to put a huge crimp in anything we’re trying to do.”

  “That’s life,” he admitted. “We’ll make sure to take Binici across. I don’t suppose you can crack open the system security files from here?”

  “With a fourteen-second round trip for radio coms?” she replied. “Not a chance, unfortunately. Binici is almost as good a cracker as I am, though, and she’s probably better at that kind of tactical work.”

  “We need to find Drummond.” Rice shook his head. “Things could get very, very messy if we need to kidnap them, though. Think we can manage to sneak someone off-station without them being noticed for three and a half hours?”

  “Wouldn’t need to,” Kelly replied. “Get everybody aboard and run for the limit at five gees. Red Falcon can pull double that with the gravity runes; we can match course and velocity and scoop the shuttle up.

  “They don’t have anything with gravity runes, so Falcon can outrun anything they’ve got.”

  “We can’t outfight them, though,” Rice reminded her.

  “So, try and be sneaky,” she told her boss. “If I’m keeping the lights on, then that part’s on you. Take Soprano?”

  “If they’re being this grouchy, we’re not taking a Mage in,” he said sadly. “No, it’s me and the Marines. We’ll get it done. Mike—you’re with me. Make sure your people are ready to handle the cargo, but I want my best pilot at the stick of what’s probably going to end up as my getaway vehicle.”

  “If we get that indiscreet in an UnArcana system, we have problems,” Kelly warned him.

  “I know. But given a choice between saving our cover and getting proof of Legatan treason, well…there are other ships and other spies,” he told her. “And the Mage-King needs that proof.

  “So, we do what we have to.”

  43

  It was a long, long flight. Normally, five-gravity stints were reserved for the stages of takeoff and landing closest to the ground, where they were needed. The shuttles in Red Falcon’s boat bays were perfectly capable of five gravities of acceleration for extended periods.

  It was the passengers who were less enthused with the idea.

  By the time Kelzin tucked the personnel shuttle into a docking port on the largest of Espresso’s orbital ring stations, David was even more grateful than normal for his cybernetic lung. Leonhart and the Marines looked battered, even with their experience with hard flights. His lung had allowed him to adapt to the acceleration better than he’d expected.

  “Get her fueled up and ready to go on the drop of a credit,” David told the pilot, who groaned. “I don’t expect to be leaving for a few days, but I want to be ready to leave if something comes up.”

  “We’ll be here,” Kelzin replied. “I’m staying on the bird, just in case.” He grimaced. “Feeling a touch paranoid, but it seems called for. I’m having flashbacks to Chrysanthemum.”

  David shared the grimace. Chrysanthemum was another UnArcana World, one where a bounty hunter had convinced the local government to try and arrest David and his people. It hadn’t ended well…for anyone.

  He was reasonably sure, for example, that Chrysanthemum had been the first time Mike Kelzin had killed anyone. That it hadn’t been the last was also David’s fault, which he couldn’t help but feel guilty about.

  “Leonhart, can we spare some people to stay with him?” David asked the security chief.

  She was already gesturing to her people.

  “We’ll want to grab a hotel nearby, then we can cycle a shift,” Leonhart told them. “The shuttle can sleep four, but my people are only so good at guarding while asleep.”

  “It’s an orbital. There should be something near the shuttle docks,” the Captain replied. “Especially if they make a habit of making people leave their ships behind.

  “I think they may reserve that for ships that can threaten their home guard,” Kelzin said. “I’ll hold down the fort, but I won’t object to a couple of burly souls with guns.”

  “Don’t worry; Jiang will be a great babysitter,” Leonhart promised.

  With rooms booked for their stay, David rented a meeting room in the dockside hotel and got to work. They didn’t have a lot of cargo, but making sure it all was delivered was still his job.

  Of course, while he was doing that with two security troops guarding the room, Binici and Leonhart were out wandering the streets, “shopping.” They’d scope out the nearest law enforcement stations and see what they figured was most accessible for their data theft.

  He, meanwhile, did some quick research on brokers and called up the one that the Patrol had given him to contact. They’d apparently had some exchanges with him to get quotes for their crystal shipment, though David’s arrival would be the first evidence the broker had of his success.

  “Good afternoon, Captain Rice,” the broker, an older gentleman named Vishal Antuma, greeted him the instant the channel connected. David hadn’t even introduced himself yet, and his surprised expression must have been obvious.

  “There are only so many ships that come through Java, Captain,” Antuma told him. “The vast majority of my day-to-day work is organizing in-system shipments, but I keep an eye out for jump-ships. Since yours is the only new one and my in-system contacts don’t call me from hotels, it could only have been you.”

  David snorted.

  “And you are apparently correct,” he allowed. “Would you care to guess what I need?”

  “You have a set of individual cargos, only a small portion of your capacity,” Antuma said. “Therefore, you don’t need much help disposing of them, though it would make your life easier. But, nonetheless, you are looking for someone to source material as much as you are looking for someone to help conclude your cargo deliveries.”

  “All right, now you’re making me nervous,” David told the other man with a grin. “I do need your help sorting out our deliveries, mostly because my ship was forbidden from getting close enough to directly off-load onto the stations. The JSDF is apparently concerned about armed merchant ships.”

  “If you build an organization to protect against a threat that is imaginary, it is inevitable that organization will imagine new threats at every turn,” the local said frankly. “The JSDF sees enemies in every mirror to justify their existence. If you return, they will be better the second time. For now…” He sighed. “That is a delay I doubt any of your contracts were expecting. If you give me the list, I’ll pour some oil on troubled waters and arrange deliveries.”

  “That would be helpful,” David confirmed. “We have the shuttlecraft to deliver our cargo, but it will take a couple of days with the flight time included. What will this cost me?”

  “There will be a fee for arranging the docking, but otherwise, consider it included in our real business,” Antuma told him. “What kind of cargo brings a twenty-million-ton megafreighter to Java, Captain Rice? Especially nearly empty. Someone paid dearly to get you here, and I wonder what they expected you to bring back.”

  “You don’t know?” David asked.

  Antuma chuckled.

  “I guess much, but in this case, I hesitate to leap to conclusions,” he noted. “So, why don’t you let me know who sent you, Captain Rice, and what you and they hope for me to acquire?”

  “Sherwood,” David told him. “I understand that you submitted a proposal to the Patrol for the round of laser optics they’d require for their new frigates. They tasked me to act as both courier for the contract and pickup driver for the cargo.”

  “Ah,” the broker allowed. “Yes, I was looking forward to hearing back from Sherwood.” He smiled thinly. “You do
understand, Captain, that one does not merely snap fingers and produce millions of tons of specifically attuned and aligned crystal optics? To acquire Sherwood’s order, depending on its details, could take weeks to months.”

  “I wasn’t going to turn down their money,” David told Antuma. “So, here I am. They’re paying me to stick around for two weeks, and I’m hoping to actually be able to dock before that’s up, but I have no idea how long it will take you to put together that cargo.”

  The broker chuckled.

  “Send me their order, Captain Rice,” he instructed. “And your list of cargos. I will see what can be made to happen.”

  By the time David had finished sorting out things with Antuma and spoken to the recipients of several of the larger cargos himself, Leonhart and Binici had returned. He gestured the two of them wordlessly to a seat as he checked the area jammer he was running on the table.

  “The advantage of using a space like this for confidential business is that no one really begrudges you jamming potential bugs,” he noted. “So, we can have our discussions in security without worrying about them.

  “What are we looking at?”

  “There are three precinct stations in the docks district, but I don’t think any of them are going to have what we want,” Leonhart admitted. “They’re beat-cop rest points, not real police stations. From what Binici says, we need a detective’s office.”

  “We need an investigation department,” the younger Marine hacker confirmed. “Their organized-crime team would be best, but any of their senior teams would have a channel to their central databanks I could use.”

  “And those offices aren’t the beat stations in the docks,” David agreed. “Would they even be up here? I’m not sure we can swing getting you down to the surface, with how the JSDF is treating us so far.”

  “There is always an organized-crime office on the orbitals,” Binici replied, which made sense to him.

  How much trouble had he got into with crime bosses and mobs on space stations? Of course the cops were up here.

  “But those offices are kept quiet and usually separate from the local police,” she continued. “Our best shot is the System Security headquarters.”

  David sighed. He’d been hoping that wouldn’t be the answer. Unless there was a military presence on the station, there was rarely anywhere more heavily secured than the headquarters of the system security force.

  “All right,” he agreed. “Let’s track it down and then go make some trouble for the greater good.”

  It wasn’t quite as bad as David had been afraid of. Often, the local headquarters of system security aboard a space station was a heavily locked-down section of the station, buried away from the main thoroughfares behind multiple levels of security.

  Java’s Systemwide Investigative Bureau was less paranoid than that, apparently. The JSIB office wasn’t open to the public, but its entrance was right next to the main-station police office, which was. Of course, getting into the Bureau office to hack their systems was an entirely different problem.

  He and his team stood in the busy “street” in front of the two offices, people streaming from an administrative section of the station through to the restaurant area on the other side of the police offices.

  “How close do you need to get?” he murmured to Binici.

  “Inside,” she told him. “Past the front desk security, for at least a couple of minutes. I can do everything remotely after that, but I need to get a tap into their internal network.”

  Short of flashing their MISS IDs, in which case he’d simply ask the JSIB detectives for what he needed, David didn’t see any way they were going to get the hacker past the security on the office.

  “Any ideas?” he asked. “I don’t suppose we have a local office we can lean on?”

  “There’s an official one on the surface. Nothing up here that anyone admits to,” Leonhart told him.

  Their conversation was silent for a moment as a couple wandered close enough to them to potentially overhear.

  “What about going under or above and trying to cut in from there?” David suggested.

  “Won’t work if they’re remotely competent,” Leonhart objected. “I’ll admit, I was counting on a publicly accessible neighbor, at least.”

  “We might be looking at asking officially,” David warned them. “And that’s risky for us here.”

  “Binici, do you need to plant the tap?” the security chief asked. “Or is it something anyone can do?”

  “It needs to be within about a meter of a main network hub,” the junior Marine replied. “I can pick those out by sight…not many can.”

  “What are you thinking, Chief?” David asked.

  “JSIB works with the Martian Marine Corps sometimes,” she replied. “There’s a Marine company providing security for the Mage Testers hidden away up here—and I’m more comfortable pulling weight for a favor with the Marines than with the locals.”

  He nodded. Every child in the Protectorate, by law, had to be tested for the Mage Gift. Testers weren’t popular on the UnArcana Worlds, since they were the only Mages that those worlds were required to permanently host. So, they hid away on space stations and had RMMC security.

  And those Marines probably had connections with the local cops.

  “Make contact,” he told Leonhart. “Let’s see what we can do.”

  44

  David should have known better than to expect anything less than the highest and best efforts from Marines. Especially bored Marines on guard duty in moderately hostile territory.

  Binici and Leonhart disappeared into the Protectorate embassy and left him to his negotiations and cargo offloading for a full day. He was starting to worry when the two women reappeared, looking like the proverbial canary-swallowing cats.

  “We got our tap,” Binici told him once the jammer was back online.

  “Do I want to know how?” he asked drily. His authority and sanction with MISS covered a long list of sins, and yet he still wasn’t sure he wanted to know what the Marines had done.

  “Probably not,” Leonhart admitted. “Nobody’s dead, I promise.”

  That was a very low bar to clear, even for intelligence operations.

  “What do we have?” he asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Binici replied distractedly, pulling a rolling case out from the stack of supplies sitting in one corner of the meeting room David was using. The case turned out to contain a miniature version of a shipside desktop console, vastly more powerful than the wrist-comps everyone wore.

  “What we have so far is access,” she continued. “And it’s fragile access, too. We need to be careful what questions we ask—the larger the data pull we’re looking for, the more likely we are to get cut off. On the other hand, no matter how small the data pulls are, we’re probably only going to get so many access requests before we get cut off.”

  She shrugged as she unfolded the console and booted it up.

  “It’s a balancing act,” Binici noted as she pulled out a pair of virtual gloves and linked into the system. “And it boils down to the very simple query: just what are we looking for?”

  David considered. It was an important question.

  “La Cosa Nostra’s gunrunning operation,” he told her. “Coral Drummond won’t be working here under that name; I want to know who they think is running guns for the mob. Once we have that, I want to know who they think is brokering long-distance deals for them, too. Names. Locations.

  “We don’t just need to know what they think is going on. We need to know where and who is doing it.”

  “They may not know that,” Binici warned.

  “They almost certainly can’t prove it, but I guarantee you they have a damned good idea.”

  At some point, the hotel was probably going to come complain to David about the fact that he was jamming the recording devices that were “only there for your safety, sir.” The fact that the jammer he was using was almost ubiquitous among busi
nesspeople meant that it would take them a while to raise any stink about its use in the private meeting room, though.

  That gave them time. Time for Binici to set up her hacking console and use the tap that the Marines had left in the Java System Investigative Bureau’s offices to break into their main database. David didn’t pretend to entirely follow what people like Binici and LaMonte did to computers, so he took the Marine’s word that it would take a while.

  Once she was in, she saw that the wall next to Binici had begun to resemble the red-string-connected diagrams of bad cop shows. She projected a second screen onto that wall and was moving data around on it with her virtual gloves as she pulled bits and pieces out of the local database.

  Then, suddenly, in mid–data pull, she stopped and sighed.

  “There we go,” she told him. “JSIB detected the hack. They let us keep the last query going long enough for them to locate the tap.” The Marine shook her head. “They were clever about it, too. It looks like they managed to short-circuit the self-destruct and take the tap intact.”

  David turned a level gaze on his subordinate, who seemed far too blasé about that fact.

  “Isn’t that bad?” he asked pointedly. “What if they trace the gear back to its source?”

  “I intentionally used a tap with a glitchy self-destruct,” Binici said with a brilliantly white-toothed grin. “It was built in Legatus, and if they track it back, it belonged to a ‘commercial market analysis’ firm known for dabbling in corporate espionage. It doesn’t lead anywhere useful.”

  Binici, it seemed, was another of the snarky and ridiculously competent women MISS seemed to keep finding for him.

  “What did we find?” he asked. “Should we get Leonhart back in here?”

  “Probably,” the Marine confirmed. “Gives me a minute to marshal my thoughts and data, in any case.”