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

  She shook her head.

  “Not even an attempt to open a channel,” she told him. “Just a boilerplate notice that they’ll be in contact after we dock.”

  The Captain sighed.

  “Too paranoid to put anything in electronic form, I assume,” he admitted. “There isn’t anyone in Madrigal with enough authority to declare the shipment illegal.”

  “The Orbit Council could,” his XO pointed out. “Those shuttles that just launched? They were being tracked by a weapons platform from the moment they broke atmo. They may say they’re neutral, but they could cut the Belters out of the fight in a minute if they chose to.”

  “And if they stopped people like us transshipping weapons in orbit, they could cut off the supply of off-world arms, too,” David agreed. “But the Sienar and Kovian governments have enough resources to destroy the ring stations. MAD at its finest.”

  LaMonte shook her head.

  “It’s bloody stupid.”

  “Most conflicts that involve people shaking nuclear-tipped missiles on planets are,” he agreed. “But the Sienar, the Kovians, the highland clans, the Belters and the Orbit Council each have their own very contradictory goals. From the MISS brief, the Protectorate wants the Council to step in as a neutral arbiter and force a peace, but the Council’s leaders are too scared of the surfacers’ surface-to-space missiles.”

  “And here we are, throwing more fuel on the fire,” she said.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But the trick, my dear XO, is that the fuel we’re throwing on the fire has frequency-hopping remote-activated trackers in it. Which means the firemen who come after us will know whose hands it passed through.”

  He smiled grimly.

  “We can’t cut the channels off quickly, not without showing our hand, but once we know the players in the distribution chain, MISS can start squeezing those channels shut.”

  David wasn’t a fan of shipping guns, but he understood why MISS needed him to. Sometimes, they were even delivering them to people with real needs and real causes.

  He couldn’t really say that about anyone in Madrigal, but it did happen.

  David left LaMonte and Kellers to deal with organizing repairs for the damage to the ship’s spine and boarded Truce Station, heading to the observation deck above their docking port. The central spindle of the ring station had no gravity, allowing him to move quickly and easily to the open space looking out over the docks.

  Some stations would have Mages put in runes for magical gravity, but that was expensive. Truce Station apparently didn’t bother with the expense, leaving the docks area in zero gee.

  As he’d anticipated, there was only one individual in the observation deck. A tall and heavyset woman in a carefully tailored pantsuit floated, watching his ship through the tall glass panes.

  “Captain Rice,” she greeted him. “Newberry may have understated your ship…and it appears you needed all of it. Just what happened?”

  “Pirates,” he said calmly. “They also underestimated us, but they knew our exact course. That always leaves… entertaining questions to be asked.”

  The floating woman sighed and nodded, pulling herself to the window.

  “You may call me Amandine,” she told him. Neither of them was going to pretend that was her name—and he wasn’t going to tell her he’d know her real name by the time he got back to his ship.

  “My contract calls for the delivery of eighteen hundred cargo containers,” she continued. “I notice there seem to be some missing.”

  “We took damage to twenty-seven cargo containers when the pirates attacked us,” David agreed. “Ten had to be ejected and destroyed for the safety of the ship. Our scans suggest approximately seventy percent of the cargo in the remaining seventeen damaged containers is intact.”

  “That’s a lot of lost gear, Captain,” Amandine told him. “Enough to wipe out your entire payment for this transport job.”

  “That’s your problem, Ms. Amandine,” he pointed out. “The contract specifically indemnifies us against loss due to pirate attacks so long as we don’t voluntarily surrender our cargo.”

  “Do you really think you can go to a contract lawyer over this, Captain?” she purred.

  “I have all the paperwork to say I have no idea what I was carrying,” David told her brightly. “So, I’d happily go to a lawyer and even a Navy dispute resolution panel. Would you?

  “Besides.” He shrugged. “Right now, I have your cargo. If you don’t pay me, I keep your cargo. And we’re back at, well, ‘you really think you can go to a contract lawyer over this?’” he echoed her own words back at her with a small grin.

  She wasn’t quite bluffing. Fortunately, neither was he. They could play some very ugly games here.

  “I don’t think that would end quite as well for you as you think,” she said coldly.

  “Ms. Amandine, my ship demonstrably has the firepower to engage anything you could possibly round up to field against me,” he replied, his voice equally frigid. “Don’t try to threaten me. We both know what the deal between me, you, and Newberry was. Honor it, and we’ll have no problems.”

  The observation deck was chill and silent for several long seconds, and then Amandine laughed.

  “Newberry told me you were a hardass,” she said. “He was right. Any idea who sold you out?”

  “Unless you and your people knew more about our trip than I would expect, it had to be someone in Newberry’s staff,” David replied carefully. “I don’t think he would risk his cargo himself, but one of his people might have got greedy.”

  “Then they’ll regret it,” Amandine said flatly. A black transfer chip appeared in her hand, seemingly from nowhere. “Payment in full, Captain Rice. We’ll begin offloading immediately, if that’s acceptable to you?”

  David paused, taking a moment to scan the chip with his wrist-comp, and then nodded as it confirmed the numbers.

  “We want those containers off our hull so we can patch up the spine,” he agreed. “Sooner you move them, the happier we all are.”

  David sent word on ahead to Red Falcon of the agreement with Amandine, which turned out to be a good thing, as his wrist-comp chimed at him less than a minute after he’d left the observation deck.

  The message was innocuous enough: a request for a meeting from a local import/export broker. Less innocent, though, was the time frame. For him to make the meeting, he’d have to head directly to the broker’s office without even returning to his ship.

  Normally, that kind of message would be ignored or sent back with a polite—or not-so-polite, depending on mood—request to reschedule.

  Despite the boilerplate text of the message it included several specific series of words and numbers that his wrist-comp happily flagged for him when he ran his MISS decryption codes.

  The broker was their MISS contact, and they were flagging as a priority well above urgent. The codes were a “drop everything and run” order. Given that most MISS local operators knew better than to risk the cover of mobile agents…

  David sighed and sent an acceptance message back.

  He trusted MISS’s people not to push the limits without reason, but if this wasn’t good enough, someone was going to hear it. At length.

  3

  Ship’s Mage Maria Isabella Soprano had just stepped out of a long, hot shower when her wrist-comp buzzed at her, alerting her to an urgent message. Drying her hair briskly with one hand, she dripped onto the mat in her tiny shipboard bathroom as she prodded the waterproof piece of electronics to disgorge the message.

  Unlike her Captain, Maria had been an MISS agent since she’d first been hired aboard Red Falcon over two years earlier. She’d had months of keeping her MISS affiliations concealed aboard ship as well as off, which meant she recognized the codeword sequence embedded in the message even before she activated her decryption codes.

  Reading over both the cover and real message, she shook her head. Wrapping the towel around her head, she crossed to the closet
and pulled out a shipsuit. Urgency was never a good sign when dealing with spies—and given the timeframes involved in any interstellar communication, it was an even worse sign.

  It would be over a day before Red Falcon was even unloaded. Another day to finish the repairs, and at least a day beyond that to load the big ship with the cargo they couldn’t justify leaving Madrigal without.

  And yet the local MISS team thought whatever news they had was urgent enough to justify this level of priority. The dark-haired native of Earth’s Brazil was still shaking her head when she finished dressing and went to leave her quarters—only to find Kelly LaMonte standing outside, about to knock. The XO was wearing “civilian” clothes, slacks and shirt, instead of the one-piece-with-concealed-vacuum-helmet shipsuit they normally wore aboard the ship. She was clearly planning on leaving the ship.

  “You got the same meeting request,” Maria said briskly. It wasn’t really a question, but LaMonte nodded anyway.

  “If we both got it, then they almost certainly pinged the Captain,” LaMonte said. “Any idea what this is?”

  “No more than you do, XO,” Maria admitted. “Only that if it’s this urgent, it can’t be good news.”

  “Offloading doesn’t even start for ten minutes. Whatever it is, it could probably have waited.”

  The Ship’s Mage chuckled. From the acerbity in LaMonte’s tone, the message had interrupted something.

  “I would agree, Kelly,” she said quietly. “Except that I do trust most MISS system agents to not use that priority lightly. So…”

  LaMonte sighed and nodded.

  “So, we go find out what the hell is going on,” she agreed. “I booked a transit pod to meet us at the airlock in ten minutes. That enough time for you?”

  “I’m already ready. Let’s go.”

  Despite a surprising degree of traffic, Maria and LaMonte’s transit pod carried them through the zero-gee center of the station and out to the rotating rim in perfect time, the pair of them arriving just as a second transit pod disgorged their broad-shouldered captain.

  Rice was clearly unsurprised to see them, waiting for the second transit pod to slow to a stop and let them out. Maria tapped a command on her wrist-comp to transfer payment to the automated taxi vehicle, and stepped over to her Captain.

  “I’m glad you got pinged as well,” he told the two women. “Not sure why we weren’t all sent the same message. Not the best communication.”

  “Someone rushed,” Maria concluded. “Things never work out the way people want when things are rushed. But…” She shook her head once again. “That level of rush makes no sense. It’ll be days before we’re able to move—and they had to know whatever they want to tell us already. It’s not like Madrigal has an RTA.”

  The Runic Transceiver Arrays were the only method of instant communication available to the Protectorate. Massive complexes of black stone and silver runes, they projected the voice of a speaking Mage to another RTA in another star system. An RTA was an immense undertaking to build and only about half of the MidWorlds had one.

  Madrigal’s internal difficulties meant it would probably be the last of the MidWorlds—the more densely populated, self-sufficient colonies that made up the bulk of the Protectorate—to get one. Maria suspected that many of the newer, currently poorer, Fringe colonies would end up with the complexes first.

  “Well, we’re not going to get answers guessing out here,” her captain groused. “Let’s go.”

  The broker’s office had a plain lobby, just a handful of chairs and a desk with a frazzled-looking young man behind it.

  “Good…morning,” he greeted them after a careful check of the time. “How may I assist you?”

  “We were all requested to attend a meeting with a Ms. Handell,” Rice told him. “Given the timeline, I’m guessing—”

  “Yes, of course, Captain Rice,” the receptionist cut him off. “Come with me, please. Ms. Handell is waiting for you.”

  Maria raised an eyebrow at her boss, but they fell in behind the young man as he led them back to a conference room tucked away deeper in the office.

  “The room is fully secured,” the young man told them. “Once I close the door behind you, you won’t have signal for your wrist-comps. Faraday cage; fully sealed to prevent bugs. We sweep the room twice a day as well.”

  “Thank you,” Maria replied. “Who are we meeting?”

  Rice hadn’t asked that. The whole situation was weird, and Maria didn’t trust that the name they’d been given was correct. She did, mostly, trust that the frazzled young MISS agent acting as a secretary would tell them the truth.

  “Ms. Elizabeth Handell, System Chief,” the youth said after a quick glance down the corridor toward the entrance. “And one other. I’m not authorized to disclose their identity.”

  Maria sighed and exchanged another look with her boss.

  “You lay down with spies, you wake up with cloak and dagger,” he said gruffly. “Let’s go find out what this is about.”

  Maria entered behind David and Kelly. The other two were probably armed, but if someone was planning on trying anything out of line, the best defense they had was an irritated Mage. She wasn’t a Royal Martian Marine Corps Combat Mage or anything similar, but she had been an officer in the Royal Martian Navy.

  She could handle herself magically in a fight, which meant that it would take entire companies of regular soldiers to stop her. Only a fool would pick a fight with a starship captain whose Ship’s Mage was standing at their shoulder.

  It didn’t seem like picking a fight was on anyone’s agenda. There were exactly two other people in the room, exactly as the young man outside had told them, and the heavyset blonde woman at the center of the conference table waved them to seats with a tired expression.

  “Captain Rice, Mage Soprano, Officer LaMonte,” she greeted them. “I am Elizabeth Handell, MISS System Chief for Madrigal. This”—she gestured to the near-skeletal man next to her—“is Alan Delacroix, also of MISS.

  “Mage Delacroix is one of our couriers.”

  Maria nodded as she took in the pale-skinned man, who wore a similar golden medallion at his throat to her, and seated herself. Courier was a misleading title in MISS. The man commanded a small starship of his own with a six-Mage crew, including himself.

  An MISS courier was responsible for keeping as many as six star systems fully informed, and they were given a lot of discretion as to what courses they picked and what messages they carried. There was a sector chief in the area—based out of the Nia Kriti System, with a Navy Fleet Base to hand—but the couriers were that woman’s right hands.

  Like the Hands of the Mage-King of Mars, the couriers spoke with their bosses’ voices. The limitations of the RTA communication network required it.

  “Mage Delacroix,” Rice greeted the pale Mage. Hopefully, he remembered the nature of the MISS’s couriers as well. “I’m guessing the urgency of this meeting was due to your presence?”

  “Yes,” he said in a raspy voice. “I arrived shortly before you did, and I will need to leave within the next couple of hours at most. I came here directly from Nia Kriti and the RTA there, carrying orders from Mars for you.

  “Your mission has changed.”

  Maria leaned back in her chair, studying Delacroix. She wasn’t surprised. There was no other reason for them to be yanked into a high-priority meeting like this, though she wondered what her captain was making of it.

  “Our current mission is mostly exploratory,” Rice told Delacroix slowly. “Once our delivery here is off-loaded, most of the immediate follow-up sits with Ms. Handell. We are tied up here for several days at a minimum and need to find a cargo.”

  “Cargo will be easy,” the courier replied. “Officially, I was here to organize a humanitarian relief expedition to Ardennes. The civil unrest there spiked into a short and bloody revolution, and the Protectorate is mobilizing resources to make sure everyone is fed and medicine is provided.”

  Despite Madrig
al’s problems, the lowland governments produced massive food surpluses, and the highland clans produced extraordinarily useful natural pharmaceuticals. There was a reason all of the system’s factions could afford to import weaponry, after all.

  “Ms. Handell’s firm will contract with you to transport those supplies to Ardennes,” he concluded. “It won’t be a full load, but we’ll pay a premium for rush delivery to justify the use of your ship—and the rush delivery is needed.”

  “What happened?” LaMonte asked, her voice suddenly very careful.

  Maria realized she wasn’t entirely sure which planet her XO was from—beyond “a MidWorld with a significant French-speaking population.” A description that covered far more than just Ardennes…but also included Ardennes.

  “Hand Alaura Stealey was investigating a terrorist incident where a small town was destroyed,” the courier explained. “It was supposedly carried out by the local revolutionary front, but…”

  “I’m guessing it wasn’t that simple?” Maria asked. It was never that simple, not if a Hand was involved.

  “No.” Delacroix’s voice was flat and he glanced over at Handell. “This doesn’t leave this room, people, but you three need to know and Handell is cleared for it. The town was destroyed by orbital bombardment—from a Navy cruiser.”

  If Maria hadn’t been sitting down, the ground would have fallen out from beneath her. The Navy was supposed to protect people. The concept of a Navy ship turning its weapons on a civilian town…it was beyond atrocity. For the Navy officer she’d been, it was closer to blasphemy.

  “Commodore Cor had made some kind of deal with the Governor,” the courier continued. “Things had gone a lot worse than anyone expected, and the worst happened.”

  The worst. Maria didn’t even dare guess what more the pale man meant by that. She let David meet the courier’s gaze as she tried to process the sheer scale of the betrayal Cor’s actions entailed.

  “We believe the Hand had evidence of the Governor’s corruption,” Delacroix said quietly. “We’re not sure what happened, but Mage-Governor Vaughn killed Hand Alaura Stealey.”