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

  Rice winced.

  “Knowing him, I probably have a message waiting for me when I get there,” Kelly said quietly, “but I’m pretty sure he was right in the middle of whatever went down there. He was a Freedom Party MP for a long time.”

  He’d been elected just before she’d left to attend a prestigious engineering school in Tau Ceti. She remembered him full of hope for change and advancement.

  Nothing she’d seen from her homeworld had suggested any of that had materialized in the last decade. The Freedom Party’s MPs had become the leaders of the Freedom Wing’s armed rebellion and, well, her granddad had died when Karlsberg was attacked from orbit.

  “You going to be okay?” Rice asked.

  “So far as I can tell, Damien already killed every single son of a bitch involved in my granddad’s death,” Kelly said fiercely. She loved Xi Wu and Mike Kelzin, but Damien Montgomery had been something more. She never expected to see him again—not if he was a Hand now—but it was somehow right that her ex-boyfriend had avenged her family.

  David Rice shook his head.

  “The details I have are terrifying,” he admitted. “Hard to think of Damien as a walking weapon of mass destruction…but he is a Hand now.”

  “And we get to see the aftermath of that,” Kelly agreed. “Repairs will be done by noon Olympus Mons Time tomorrow; loading will be finished sixteen hours after that. Less than two days before we can be on our way.”

  “And the moment we’re loaded, we’re gone,” her Captain confirmed. “We’ll help finish the fix Damien started, Kelly, even if putting everything back together is a job for other hands than ours.”

  “We never stay long enough anywhere for that,” she said quietly. They homeported in Tau Ceti along with Peregrine, the other ship David owned, but they were there maybe once or twice a year. Only the ship was home.

  “That’s the job,” he agreed. “As merchants or as spies…that’s just the nature of the job. You know you can…”

  She laughed.

  “Retire?” she asked. “At the grand old age of ‘not quite thirty’? Nah, boss. Just wishing I’d had one last chance to see my granddad. I wouldn’t give up this job for anything short of a ship of my own.”

  Rice saluted her with a wineglass. They both knew her XO’s share of their jobs was rapidly amounting to enough to retire on most worlds but was still far short of enough to buy a starship.

  But “a ship of their own” was the ambition of every executive officer in the galaxy, and Captains, especially Captains who owned more than one ship, were known for making sure their XOs made that happen in the end.

  6

  Maria wasn’t even remotely sad to see Truce Station in their rear cameras. Madrigal was a continuing failure of both her old service and her new one. The Protectorate should have been able to put a stop to the constant five-way civil war, but it had never happened.

  Both the covert spy she’d become and the naval officer she’d been could understand why. Resolving Madrigal’s problems would have required the Protectorate to either pick a side in the war, and none of the local factions’ hands were clean, or move in and occupy the entire system.

  Neither of those options would be bloodless or cheap. So, the Mage-King had left Madrigal to sort their own problems out, like so many other systems.

  Maria wasn’t under any illusions that the Protectorate’s system was perfect, but it was still jarring to run into a failure of this scale—an entire star system left to feuding clans and low-intensity bloodshed.

  “Simulacrum chamber, this is Rice,” a voice echoed into the enchanted space at the heart of Red Falcon’s hull that allowed her to jump between the stars. “I make it six hours to jump space. What are you seeing?”

  Every sensor that Falcon possessed routed to the simulacrum chamber. Every wall in the room was layered with screens that showed the exterior camera feeds and could be overlaid with a thousand more esoteric scans.

  Looping through those screens and covering every inch of the roughly oval chamber were the silver runes of the starship’s jump matrix. To have both the screens and runes visible and useful to the Mages required very careful design, and every simulacrum chamber Maria had ever used had been functionally identical.

  She tapped commands on the console next to her. A small platform suspended her in the air against the ship’s acceleration, positioning her next to the simulacrum itself, a semi-liquid silver model of Red Falcon. The “model” was, in a strange sense, the ship—and its existence was the only reason the ship could move between the stars.

  “We could jump in three,” she told the Captain. “I know I won’t enjoy the headache, but I get the impression that cutting even half a dozen hours off our trip might be worth it.”

  “It might,” Rice said. “You know I don’t like to push your people, though.”

  Civilian rules said a Mage couldn’t jump more than once every eight hours and couldn’t cast the spell in any significant gravitational field.

  Navy rules cut that minimum wait to six and allowed a maximum gravity over an order of magnitude higher. The Navy sustained that by having much higher minimum standards than most merchant starships. Maria had hired two ex-Navy Mages and, well, Xi Wu. Xi Wu might not have all of the defensive and combat training of the Navy Mages, but she certainly had the capacity to jump like them.

  “We’ll make this run at Navy standard,” she decided. It was her call, after all. “If any of them complain, I’ll have Xi Wu make puppy eyes at them. She’s worried about LaMonte, and that woman has weapons-grade sad eyes.”

  Rice chuckled, but there was an edge to it.

  “I’m worried about Kelly,” he admitted. “It looks like whatever family she had left died before the Governor was overthrown. The whole mess is ugly, and I’m going to be keeping a careful eye on her.”

  “She’s your executive officer,” Maria pointed out. There was only so much “keeping a careful eye on” LaMonte that Rice could do without undermining her authority as the ship’s Second Officer.

  “I know, and I don’t plan on babysitting her,” the Captain agreed. “But she’s still young and most of us didn’t have to come back to a homeworld that just saw a revolution.”

  “We won’t be there for long,” she replied. “Drop off the cargo, pick up the information, find a contract to move on, right?”

  “Depends on where we need to move on to,” Rice said. “I don’t even know what will be shipping out from Ardennes right now. Our contract covers costs to travel away from Ardennes if we can’t find a cargo—pretty standard for humanitarian relief contracts,” he explained, which Maria appreciated. She hadn’t been involved in a humanitarian mission except from the Navy side before.

  “But we can’t justify going anywhere particularly far,” she guessed.

  “Exactly. A cargo will help; otherwise, we’re basically heading to the next system over and finding work. It’s hard to justify running Falcon empty.”

  Maria helped LaMonte and Rice review the books every month. Red Falcon was much bigger and faster than most merchant ships in the Protectorate. So long as she was carrying cargo, she was making money hand over fist.

  If she was running empty or sitting still she was burning money almost as fast as she made it while working. MISS underwrote their operations to a degree, but she still couldn’t burn cash for long without questions.

  “We’ll see what we find in Ardennes,” Maria said. “Every step afterward comes from there.”

  Maria gathered her three subordinates in the “Mages’ Sanctum,” the mixed office and working space next to the simulacrum chamber in every starship. On many ships, the Sanctum was the only space in the ship with working gravity runes.

  Falcon had those throughout her key working areas, but the Sanctum remained the primary working space of her Mages and the best place to nail them all down for a conversation.

  She made sure to be seated before they arrived. They all knew she’d just jumped them out of
the Madrigal System, but there was no point in being visibly weakened and exhausted in front of her people.

  Alessandra Barrow and Karl Nguyen were an almost-matched pair. Both were of merely average height and bore the distinctively mixed ethnic features of the families produced by the Eugenicists’ Project Olympus. They had skin the tone of faded parchment and eyes with noticeable epicanthic folds.

  Like the majority of the Protectorate’s Mages—and Maria herself—they traced their ancestry to the forced-breeding program carried out in Olympus Mons to recreate the gift of magic in humanity. That program had eventually backfired on the Eugenicists when the older “subjects” revolted, led by the man who would become the first Mage-King of Mars.

  Both sat ramrod-straight, the legacy of a decade of service in the Royal Martian Navy. Xi Wu, the attractive Chinese Mage who was Maria’s second-in-command, lacked that discipline.

  She was also more powerful than any of the Navy Mages, if less well trained. Rice had hired her before Maria had come aboard as Ship’s Mage, on Kelly LaMonte’s recommendation before the pair had been lovers.

  Maria had chosen not to object then—and continued to rank that as one of her smarter choices.

  “All right,” she greeted them. “If you have somehow managed to miss it, we’re carrying a humanitarian cargo to the Ardennes System. There’s some more layers to the mission after that,” she noted with an airy wave of her hand, “but that’s the immediately important bit.”

  She met Xi Wu’s gaze levelly.

  “What you may not know, if you’re not Xi, anyway, is that Ardennes is Officer LaMonte’s homeworld. She’s understandably concerned about the conflict even if she seems enthusiastic enough about the Governor’s overthrow to make me wonder just what the asshole was doing.”

  “So, we’re Navy-jumping it,” Barrow said brightly. She checked the schedule on her wrist-comp. “That puts me up in about seventy minutes, right?”

  “Exactly,” Maria confirmed. “Usual rotation, but we’re running on six-hour jumps. Xi—can you double-check the schedule and make whatever adjustment is needed to make sure I make the jump into the system? I figure I can shave another two or three hours off at that end, too.”

  “We can do it,” Nguyen said firmly. “Hell, boss, I was half-expecting it just on the ‘humanitarian aid cargo,’ even without knowing that it was LaMonte’s homeworld.” He coughed. “Which, I admit, I didn’t.”

  “We don’t exactly publish everyone’s homeworld on the door to their quarters or anything, Mage,” Maria pointed out. “I appreciate everyone’s willingness.”

  “Hey, I didn’t agree yet,” Xi Wu pointed out with a chuckle.

  “And what are the odds you aren’t going to go out of your way for your girlfriend?” Maria asked.

  “Zero, but you should at least ask!”

  7

  Ardennes was an oddly colored planet. The pale purple native trees were extremely hardy and had managed to spread across easily seventy percent of the planet’s surface. Massive deposits of heavy metals and rare earths, combined with those trees, had made the planet an attractive target for colonization. A massive fault line, clearly visible from orbit, rendered one of the three continents not quite uninhabitable, but the other two were temperate and resource-rich.

  Kelly remembered some of what was hidden behind that gorgeous purple color. The harsh, almost vicious pressure applied to grow the local industry. The cavalier disregard for safety regulations. The industrial accidents that killed at almost four times the average rate of a MidWorld.

  She’d been too young to really understand what Mage-Governor Vaughn and his Prosperity Party had been doing, until her parents’ deaths had driven home three terrifying facts to a fifteen-year-old top student.

  Firstly, the industrial accident that had killed them both shouldn’t have happened. Basic safety precautions in the construction of the factory that had fallen on them would have prevented their deaths.

  Secondly, that they hadn’t needed to die. Both had survived the initial chaos when the factory had collapsed across the road they’d been driving along. Prompt medical attention would have saved their lives…but triage on the planet Ardennes went by political importance before it went by need, and a Prosperity Party MP’s son had also been in the blast zone.

  Lastly had been why she’d fought her way into the scholarship that got her off-world: nothing on Ardennes was going to change. There’d been an inquiry—the involvement of the MP’s son had guaranteed that!—but it had scapegoated the shift supervisor, dead in the explosion, and whitewashed the owners and managers of the factory who had cheaped out on the proper containment vessels.

  She’d thrown herself into getting even better grades, earning one of the one thousand scholarships available for MidWorld students to attend the Tau Ceti Institute of Technology, and getting off-world.

  Her grandfather had gone into politics…and a recorded message had been waiting for her when Red Falcon arrived in the system. Kelly didn’t want to listen to it, not really. Once she did, she’d know for sure he was gone.

  But she owed it to him, too, and she sighed and tapped the command on her wrist-comp.

  She recognized him instantly. The years she’d been away hadn’t been kind to Anthony Hellet, but she’d know him anywhere. His hair had gone white and patchy, and he’d acquired a new scar across his face, but it was him.

  “My dear Kelly,” he began. “This message has been left with people I trust, who know what I’m up to and can make sure it doesn’t get used against me. That’s the only way someone can be honest on Ardennes today.

  “Sadly, if you’re receiving it, I am dead. Our efforts to reform our world politically ended as you always warned me they would,” he admitted. “We failed. Vaughn had us locked down every way we could turn.

  “So, some of us are going one step further. We’re going to try and fight. You know I can’t stand by, not after what happened to your mother. We’ll take the fight to Vaughn and we will fix this, I swear it.

  “I can only hope that if you are seeing this, I died liberating our world and not for nothing,” Hellet said quietly. “Either way, know that I died doing what I believed in. I will not leave our world in the hands of a monster for one day longer than I have to.

  “I’m sorry it has come to this and one sad recorded message,” he told her, “but that’s life, I suppose. I hope you’re well. I hope you’re happy. Know that I always loved you.”

  The message ended, and Kelly turned her head back to the main screen in her office with its view of the planet below.

  All she could see through her tears was a purple haze.

  “I’m guessing the battleship is new?” Captain Rice asked Kelly when she joined him on the bridge a few minutes later, gesturing to the sensor screens.

  Several of the Royal Martian Navy’s battleships were based out of Tau Ceti, so the merchant officer had at least seen one before. She was even relatively sure she’d seen this particular battleship before—it wasn’t like the RMN had very many of the things.

  “There were cruisers posted at the logistics base when I left home,” she told her boss. “Never a battleship.”

  There were still cruisers. Four were active, positioned equally around Ardennes’s equator in orbits that allowed them to watch the entire star system. Active sensors washed out from them on a regular basis.

  A trio of wrecked cruisers hung in a lower orbit as shuttles swarmed over them, probably from the Navy logistics ship nearby, as they assessed whether the cruisers were reparable. Three intact cruisers and eight intact destroyers, the smaller ships probably Kelly’s homeworld’s fleet, shared the logistics ship’s orbit in silence—directly under the battleship’s guns.

  “There’s still a detectable radiation storm where the battle took place,” Rice said grimly. “I’m guessing the Navy cleaned up loose munitions, but the battlespace looks as ugly as some chunks of Sol.”

  Sol was still, almost two hundred year
s later, paying for the century-long Eugenics Wars between the madmen who’d conquered Mars—and created the Mages—and Earth. All of those old missiles and railgun rounds were long dead, but vacuum was a powerful preservative.

  There were still sections of space, continually updated by trained professionals, where ships couldn’t safely fly. It would be another hundred years before it was all cleaned up, at least.

  The Martian Navy was far more careful about cleaning up after themselves.

  “I’m heading down to Nouveau Versailles,” the Captain continued. “I’ll want you to come with me as a native guide. I get the impression the city is physically intact but in…moral shock, I suppose.”

  Kelly snorted.

  “The people here were always good at professing morals and looking blankly the other way,” she said bitterly. “It’s good to know they woke up eventually.”

  “Are you okay to come down?” Rice asked.

  She exhaled slowly, then nodded.

  “Yeah. There’s nothing for me here, but we’ll do what we can. Any of our people can oversee the offloading. With only half a cargo, I’d be all right leaving it to Ardennes Orbital to take care of.”

  “Let’s leave it with Mike,” the Captain suggested. “No offense to your homeworld, but I prefer my people in charge of my ship.”

  She forced a half-chuckle.

  “Fair enough, skipper.”

  It felt like Nouveau Versailles should have changed more. Kelly had only ever visited the capital in passing, but it felt like nothing much had changed. It was the same sprawl of suburbs and crappy government-built tenements wrapped around corporate towers.

  The Governor’s house was a wreck and there were signs of combat in the downtown core visible even from the air, yet the city seemed unchanged. Given everything that had happened, that almost felt more obscene than if the city had been in flames.