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

  The room was very quiet for a surprisingly long time.

  David finally shook himself out of his shock, glancing over at Soprano to check in on his ex-Navy Mage. She seemed even more shaken than he was—but then, he’d been a Navy Chief. She’d been the executive officer on an RMN destroyer.

  “How?” he finally asked, trying to take control of the meeting while he processed just what had to have happened.

  “We’re not sure,” Delacroix admitted. “We know she died and we know that Hand Montgomery was shot down. The details of the events leading to Hand Stealey’s death are unclear.”

  “Wait.” David couldn’t possibly have heard the courier right. “Hand Montgomery? Damien Montgomery?”

  “Yes,” he confirmed. “Mage Damien Montgomery was attending the mission as an observer, bearing his Majesty’s Warrant and Voice. They say when one Hand falls, another rises—and that’s what happened on Ardennes.

  “If Mage-Governor Vaughn believed murdering Hand Stealey would end his problems, he was very, very wrong. Hand Montgomery took over her mission and completed it.”

  “You said he was shot down?” LaMonte said quietly. Damien Montgomery had been her boyfriend once. For all that David was quite sure she was happy with her current relationship, the young Mage had certainly made an impression on them all.

  “How did he go from being shot down to stopping the Governor?” Red Falcon’s XO asked, her voice impressively level.

  “That’s why he’s a Hand and I’m merely a courier,” Delacroix said with a chuckle. “He coopted the resistance and turned a bunch of rebels and the icon of Stealey’s rank into a force that toppled the planetary government.”

  David shivered. Somehow, he couldn’t put that beyond the intense young man he’d once hired.

  “So, we’re going to meet Damien?” he asked carefully.

  “No. As of my leaving Nia Kriti, Montgomery was on his way back to Mars with Hand Stealey’s body,” Delacroix told them. “One of the things he did discover, though, was that Legatus had been arming the rebels through a number of intermediaries.

  “MISS and Protectorate Secret Service agents on Ardennes are investigating further and should have collated more information by the time you arrive. Your orders are to proceed to Ardennes and touch base with Mars via the RTA there. Most likely, I expect that you’ll be called upon to use your connections and cover in the arms smuggling business to follow the chain back to Legatus.”

  The courier shook his head.

  “We need proof, Captain Rice. Proof we can lay before a court and the Council of the Protectorate,” he noted. “Suspicions and hearsay and coincidence may convince us, but we’re spies and our job is to find the pattern.

  “The Council needs the hardest of proof if they’re going to sanction a Core World government.”

  “I know the deal,” David replied. He shook his head slowly. Alaura Stealey had recruited Damien off his ship. She’d saved his life and the lives of every member of his old crew at the same time—and she’d been the one to recruit David himself into the Martian Interstellar Security Service.

  “If Legatus helped killed Hand Stealey, we’ll find out,” he promised.

  Delacroix sighed.

  “That’s the problem with this particular situation, isn’t it?” he asked. “They may have illegally armed a rebellion—but that rebellion just ended up helping us bring a rogue Governor to justice. It makes it easier to track them down, but…”

  “Still feels odd to use the time they helped us against them,” David agreed. “But that’s our job, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t like being a spy. He just didn’t have it in him to stand aside.

  4

  Alaura Stealey was dead.

  Despite all of the shocks in his meeting with the MISS courier, that one stuck out in David’s head as he and his officers made their way back to Red Falcon.

  A Hand of the Mage-King was dead. That happened, he supposed—Damien Montgomery had come into possession of the rune that had saved their ship on a piece of skin flayed from the skin of one—but it wasn’t common.

  The saying “a Hand falls, another rises” wasn’t normally quite so literal as it had apparently been on Ardennes. Normally, it simply meant that killing a Hand inevitably brought another Hand, and the replacement tended to show up with squadrons of the Royal Martian Navy and battalions of the Royal Martian Marine Corps.

  Alaura Stealey had saved David’s life and crew as much as Damien Montgomery had. Montgomery had killed the crime lord chasing them, but that man’s last act had been to initiate a missile launch that their ship couldn’t survive.

  Stealey had arrived in time to intercept those missiles. She’d then drafted Montgomery to the service of the Mage-King, destroyed David’s old ship with its insanely dangerous upgrades, and gifted David a new ship: Red Falcon.

  Later on, she’d recruited him for the Martian Interstellar Security Service. He wouldn’t say he knew her well, but he’d known her. She was a rock in his interactions with the Protectorate government, someone he trusted completely.

  And she was dead.

  His brain was going in circles and he knew it. He glanced over at Soprano and LaMonte. The Mage seemed as calm as ever, and he suspected LaMonte was more thrown by the reveal about Montgomery.

  It wasn’t every day you learned your ex-boyfriend was now a Hand of the Mage-King of Mars.

  David forced himself to exhale and then firmly met his officers’ gazes in the transit pod.

  “We’ll talk back at the ship,” he told them quietly. “The walls have ears here in Madrigal and I want to pull in everyone.”

  The walls had ears everywhere, for that matter. Madrigal’s continuing civil conflict just meant there were even more reasons to listen in.

  “But…we have a contract,” he concluded. “It’s better than shipping empty.”

  His words were those of a merchant captain. His meaning, though, was different—and the two women knew what he meant.

  Red Falcon’s crew had a mission now. A more immediate one than the general slow infiltration of the arms-smuggling world they’d been engaged in for the last year.

  They had a job to do.

  Red Falcon’s cargo spars were sufficiently separated from her rotating gravity ring that there was no vibration or noise to let the officers gathered in the briefing room know the ship was being off-loaded. One wall of the briefing room was set to a video feed from an exterior camera, showing the swarming shuttles and EVA-suited workers off-loading the big ship’s cargo.

  David had gathered all of his officers in the room. Alexander Jeeves sat next to the video screen, poking at a tablet in front of him. James Kellers, the black-skinned chief engineer, was next to the gunner, with his own tablet.

  The Captain was close enough to see that Kellers was going over a schematic of the damage to the spine.

  Next to them was his First Pilot, LaMonte’s boyfriend, Mike Kelzin. The First Pilot had been promoted about six months before, leaving LaMonte and her lovers running half of David’s ship. If the three of them weren’t so good at their jobs, he’d be worried.

  Rhianna Leonhart sat between Maria Soprano and Kelly LaMonte on the other side of the table, the broad-shouldered blonde woman studying the rest of the officers.

  “So, I’m guessing we’ve news?” the Marine said grimly.

  “Yeah, and little of it good,” David replied. “Hand Alaura Stealey was killed in action three weeks ago on the planet Ardennes. Hand Damien Montgomery has resolved the situation, but we’re being called in for two purposes.

  “Firstly, we have been officially contracted by the Royal Martian Navy to carry a humanitarian relief shipment of food and medicine to Ardennes. It sounds like the conflict was relatively localized, but the Protectorate wants to make sure no one slips through the cracks. We’ll report to the interim Governor on arrival and provide whatever assistance we can under that contract.”

  He paused, letting the shock of
the news of Hand Stealey’s death sink in.

  “Ardennes is currently in a state of flux,” he continued. “Hand Montgomery”—a combination of words that still made him shake his head in wonder—“removed Mage-Governor Vaughn for treason and Hand Stealey’s murder. He used local rebel forces to enact said removal, and there are apparently concerns about reprisals and similar issues.

  “The planet is currently under the direct rulership of Mars,” he told them. That was even rarer than the death of a Hand. The Protectorate Charter allowed the Mage-King to take direct control when things went truly sideways, but it was a messy process and one that had only been executed twice before.

  “There’s a second purpose to our visit?” Leonhart asked. “Because just helping out in the aftermath of that kind of chaos seems like plenty to keep us busy.”

  “That problem, Rhianna, rests with the Martian government and the Martian Navy,” David pointed out. “Our job is to deal with longer-term threats to the Protectorate than the immediate unrest on one world—not to mention that we’re supposed to deal with subtler threats.”

  “What kind of threat are we looking into, then?” Jeeves asked. He paused in thought, then shook his head. “Wait. I can guess. Unless Montgomery had an army in his pocket, those rebels had to be far better equipped than they had any right to be.”

  “I don’t have full details,” David admitted, “but it appears that Montgomery gave the galaxy a very thorough demonstration of what happens when a Hand goes to war. But you’re right.”

  What information he had suggested that David’s old Ship’s Mage had single-handedly stormed the fortified planetary command bunker. That didn’t line up with the quiet but intense young man he’d known, and yet…

  “I’ve seen Hands fight,” Leonhart said quietly. “I don’t know Montgomery, though I know some of you do…but if he’s a Hand, the Governor didn’t know what hit him.”

  “Basically,” David agreed. “But he didn’t do it alone, and the people he worked with had access to quite the arsenal of weaponry—from Legatan battle lasers to Legatan stealth gunships.”

  “Legatan,” Jeeves echoed. “Were they dealing with Legatus?”

  “That’s the interesting part,” David continued. “So far as the intel I have says, no. There was a lot going on, and only the most basic information made it to Nia Kriti before Mage Delacroix had to leave. We’ll get an update when we arrive, but that is where we come in.”

  “We’re tracking the source of their guns,” Soprano explained to everyone. “We’ll need to play our cover by ear, taking contracts as we can find them to follow the trail, but since the rebels on Ardennes are willing to talk to us…”

  “That’s one hell of a thread to yank on,” Jeeves agreed. “A gunrunner’s worst nightmare is a client that decides to talk to authorities. If we can follow the trail back to the source of the guns…”

  “Then we may actually be able to dig up the evidence MISS wants on the Legatans causing trouble,” David finished. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to directly talk to the rebels, this ‘Freedom Wing,’ but there are agents on the ground interviewing everyone as we speak. By the time we get to Ardennes, we should know enough to start looking.”

  “Isn’t that going to be suspicious?” LaMonte asked. “If we visit Ardennes and then start following the chain back from there?”

  “We’ll have to be careful,” he agreed. “We’ll cover our trail as best as we can, but we’ll also be looking to deal. Our smuggling bona fides should hold up to anyone we make contact with, and we’ll see how deep into the onion we can go.

  “We may not peel back everything this time around, but even knowing who the middlemen two or three layers back are will make the next round of investigations easier.”

  Red Falcon’s crew would almost certainly not be the ones to get the proof needed for Mars to move against the first and most powerful UnArcana World. But every piece of groundwork they laid was one step closer to ending whatever game Legatus was playing.

  Hopefully, before it turned into outright civil war.

  5

  Kelly LaMonte dodged a transport cart carrying replacement parts for Red Falcon’s damaged core with practiced ease despite her distraction. The repair needed to be complete before they could start loading their cargo for Ardennes, and the reports she had been reading said they needed to be at her homeworld sooner rather than later.

  It was odd to think that she’d be going home. Of course, that was assuming she had any time to step off the ship when they were in the star system. Work came first, and it wasn’t like she had anyone left on Ardennes.

  She’d had a grandfather left. He hadn’t quite understood his not-Quebec Reformation Christian, not-straight granddaughter, but he’d cared. Anthony Hellet had cared about everything and everyone, from his work, to his friends, to his town.

  That had dragged him into politics and, apparently, eventually into rebellion. And when Mage-Governor Vaughn had decided that Karlsberg was going to be an example, Kelly LaMonte’s grandfather had been at ground zero of a kinetic strike launched by a warship of the Royal Martian Navy.

  Going home was going to suck.

  “Hey!” she barked as raised voices echoed through the loading dock, launching herself purposefully across the zero-gee space with almost-grateful determination. “What are you lot going on about?”

  Three new men had materialized out of nowhere and started hassling the team trying to offload the load of hull plating. They turned to face her with a precision difficult in zero-gee, and she fixed them with her coldest glare.

  “Not sure how it’s your business, missy,” the center figure told her.

  “That cargo of plating is heading into my ship,” Kelly told him firmly. “It’s fixing damage we took fighting pirates so that we can deliver a cargo of humanitarian suppliers to my homeworld. Any delay in that repair puts the lives and health of people at risk, so if you want to cause trouble, you need to talk to me.”

  “Ain’t your business, still,” the man replied. “This lot haven’t paid their dock access fee; it’s local business.”

  Translation: they hadn’t paid their protection money, and the leg-breakers were here to demand it. From the stubborn set of the workers’ faces, it wasn’t going to go well for anyone.

  Kelly’s cold gaze didn’t waver.

  “The Madrigal System is astonishingly lacking in a central government,” she said calmly. “Do you really think anyone would manage to sort out the paperwork to arrest me before we left with our cargo if I shot you dead right here and now?”

  In the back of her mind, she was calculating every reason that was a horrible idea, but she was just a little pissed off right now.

  “You dare threaten me!” the thug spluttered.

  “I don’t care in the slightest about your ‘local business,’” she told him. “You can discuss that with these gentlemen at any time and any place…except here. Except now. Because if you get in the way of my repairs, I will end you.”

  There were four “security guards” positioned around the space with zero-gee carbines. They were Forward Combat Intelligence Marines, elite soldiers trained to deadly perfection—and then trained again to hide it. They might be slouching in zero-gee and looking as distracted as she’d felt a moment before, but she knew they were watching this confrontation.

  She might not be able to outdraw the thug—but she knew the Marines could.

  “And there’s a lot of fun legal questions about what the executive officer of a starship is allowed to do in the loading bays, aren’t there?” she asked. “I suggest you get the fuck out of our way and have your discussion another time.

  “Clear?”

  Kelly held the thug’s gaze for several seconds, and then he unexpectedly barked a loud laugh.

  “We’re clear, little tiger,” he told her, then glanced at the workers hauling the plating. “I suggest you boys do good work for the tiger here,” he continued. “It appears
we don’t want to get on her bad side!”

  A half-mocking, half-serious salute later, and the thugs were gone.

  Somehow, Kelly doubted that was going to be the last Red Falcon heard from them.

  “So, what’s this I hear about death threats on the loading dock?” the Captain asked over the senior officers’ working dinner several hours later.

  “Some local leg-breakers were trying to collect protection money from the team loading our cargo plating,” Kelly replied with forced cheer. “I convinced them to see the error of their ways, at least in regard to causing trouble on our loading dock.”

  Rice snorted.

  “And what would you have done if they decided to push it, my dear XO?” he asked drily.

  “I don’t know about the security team, but I was carrying a SmartDart gun,” she replied with an innocent smile.

  SmartDarts were self-contained tasers that came along with a small suite of expensive medical sensors. They assessed the weight and health of their target and then delivered a carefully calibrated charge. They were all but guaranteed to both take down the target and do so nonlethally.

  Each individual SmartDart was also roughly the price of an entire magazine of, say, merely explosive munitions.

  “So, you would have shot him,” Rice said with a chuckle.

  “Yep. He’d have lived, too, though I suspect the Orbit Council’s security people would love to have had a few words with him.”

  Her Captain shook his head, glancing around the table. Following his glance, Kelly realized everyone else was distracted and the pair of them were isolated at the end of the meal.

  “Ardennes is your homeworld, isn’t it?” he said quietly. “You have family.”

  She sighed and stared at her hands.

  “Folks died while I was at school. Industrial accident of the kind that doesn’t happen on most planets,” she admitted. “Granddad was left…but he ran a union in Karlsberg. You read the report.”