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

  The interviewer didn’t say anything.

  “Honestly? I wasn’t involved enough in that side of things to put the pieces together,” Armstrong admitted. “Other people were taking care of getting the guns into our people’s hands. I’d arranged the funding and helped out with covers for the shipments, but…actually receiving and handling the weapons was on others.”

  “And did those others know about the LMID offer?”

  Armstrong snorted again.

  “I didn’t exactly bandy that about,” she noted. “Only the people who’d been top members of the Freedom Party knew about that. Almost no one who played a major role in the Freedom Wing knew.”

  “Can you tell us who you dealt with in Amber?” the interviewer asked.

  “We weren’t really on a names basis,” she replied. “Code phrases and identifiers. I’ll hand over the files we have. I don’t know how much use it will be.… I’m not entirely comfortable betraying the people who helped us, either.”

  “Honestly, Ms. Armstrong, we don’t care about most of the people running guns,” the interviewer told her. “In a perfect world, we’d intervene in any possible revolution before it got that far. We do care about the Legatan connection.”

  She nodded.

  “The only name I know is the Captain who delivered most of the cargo. Seule. His name was Nathan Seule.”

  “I’m guessing that name means something to you?” Soprano asked him once they’d ended the recording and David had leaned back thoughtfully, studying the now-dark screen.

  “Captain Nathan Seule of Luciole,” David replied. “Luciole is one of the few civilian ships I’ve ever seen with antimatter engines—and the only ship I’ve ever seen with both antimatter and fusion engines. She was built in Sol for the Navy, an experimental blockade runner they decided they had no real use for.”

  He sighed.

  “I owe Seule my life and the lives of my crew,” he continued. “When bounty hunters came after us while we were working with him, he intervened. Drove off the hunter, saved Blue Jay. But…he’s an arms smuggler, all right.

  “Works with Keiko, delivering her ‘revolutions in a box’ to the groups that meet her strict moral standards. I presume he worked with others, but…” David studied the screen and smothered a curse.

  “It’s entirely possible he was working with Keiko when he delivered to Ardennes,” he noted. “Either way, she’s our best chance for finding him and he’s our best chance for following the chain.”

  “So, Amber, then?” Soprano asked.

  “God, I wish I saw another answer,” he admitted. “I’m relatively sure that Keiko at least guesses my side job, but the last thing I want is to sit down with my lover—the woman who runs a multisystem trade syndicate and arms revolutions as a hobby—and go ‘so, hey, I’m actually a cop and I need to know about your gunrunning.’”

  His Mage chuckled.

  “What, you don’t think that will go over well?”

  “You’ve met Alabaster,” LaMonte noted from the other side of the table. David’s XO was being uncharacteristically silent. “It’s going to go over like a ton of bricks and you’re going to have to dig upwards fast, boss.

  “But…she’s also always been in the gunrunning business to make a difference, not to make a buck,” the XO noted. “There’s a difference between arming the people you see acting as the Protectorate’s conscience and helping Legatus foment outright civil war.”

  “We don’t know that’s what’s happening,” David pointed out. “We can guess, we can postulate, but we have no real data to support that Legatus is trying to destabilize the Protectorate.”

  He could guess and postulate with a high degree of certainty, and it felt strange to him to say they didn’t know, but…they really didn’t. The stack of circumstantial evidence and questionable actions and deceptions and guns and bodies was a mile high…but none of it was proof.

  Even if he could point at that stack of possible and say that Legatus had been acting in bad faith…he wasn’t sure why.

  “We need that data,” he said quietly. “We need that proof. MISS as a whole is convinced Legatus is preparing for a civil war, but we have nothing that could justify Mars acting. That conviction can fuel preparation, can fuel security measures…but without proof, we can’t do anything until they move.”

  “So, we go talk to your girlfriend?” LaMonte replied. “I don’t envy you that chat, boss.”

  “No. But it’s our only option. I’ll talk to Van Der Merwe, see if they can get us a cargo to Amber.”

  He sighed again and shook his head.

  “And I suppose I’ll tell Kellers we’re visiting his homeworld. He’ll want to stock up on hard liquor before we leave.”

  The chief engineer was from Amber. To David’s knowledge, James Kellers went back only when David dragged him. And he usually managed to get very drunk on his way in.

  10

  To David’s surprise, the response to his requesting a meeting with Director Van Der Merwe was silence for several hours…and then the Director showing up at the docking tube for Red Falcon, politely asking that the security officer let them aboard.

  The jumpsuit-clad head spy seemed to enjoy the degree to which they’d discomfited David’s crew. Today’s jumpsuit was a deep maroon—but, in the lights of the space station and Red Falcon herself, unquestionably glittered.

  “There are two paths to anonymity, Captain Rice,” they told David as they took a seat in his office. “One is to blend in. The other is to present an easily classified image, one that is filed and forgotten…and never investigated in depth.”

  Van Der Merwe grinned at him. “Plus, well, I like this style.”

  David chuckled, shaking his head as he poured coffee for the Director.

  “I didn’t expect you to come all this way yourself,” he noted.

  “I was already on my way up for other reasons,” Van Der Merwe admitted. “Since I was up here already, simply showing up seemed the most convenient method.”

  “If not necessarily covert,” David pointed out. His ship’s cover as a civilian ship with its fingers in the underworld was worth a lot to the MISS. He didn’t think the Regional Director had just blown his cover, but it still seemed odd.

  “This outfit is the height of fashion in a set of younger spacers,” the spy told him. “There are at least two or three hundred glitter-suits on the station, and believe me, no one is looking past the jumpsuit to see the faces.”

  They shrugged.

  “Plus, well, there’s a worm in the station’s network that replaces my face in any video or pictures taken with a randomly selected other person. If I was being physically followed, they might have been able to identify me boarding your ship…but between myself and several bodyguards that your security officer didn’t notice, I don’t think they’d have had as much luck as that.”

  David made a touché gesture.

  “Never question a spy’s tradecraft, I suppose,” he admitted.

  “No. Always question the tradecraft when your cover is on the line,” Van Der Merwe replied instantly. “Your cover is worth a lot to MISS,” they noted, echoing David’s thoughts from a moment before. “I have no intention of blowing it.

  “Now, what did you need?”

  “I need a contract to Amber of sufficient mass or urgency to justify sending Red Falcon,” David told him instantly. “We’ve identified one of the Captains who delivered the arms to the Freedom Wing, and while I may not find him on Amber, I know people there who can find him.”

  The Director nodded.

  “Amber is quite some distance away,” they noted. “Ardennes does some business with them, but not much. In normal times, you wouldn’t have much luck getting a cargo heading in that direction.”

  “And right now?”

  “Right now, I figured the odds were about sixty-forty we were going to be sending you to Amber, so I made special arrangements,” Van Der Merwe told him with a grin. “There are a n
umber of businesses that do ship there, and I arranged for all of their regular shipping plans to fall through.

  “So, they’re looking for a carrier,” David concluded. He concealed a sigh at the fact that MISS’s needs were, once again, damaging businesses.

  “Indeed. They’ll also all come into some contracts from the interim government to cover the losses and freight premiums they’re going to have to pay,” the Director noted, replying to David’s unspoken concern. “I need them to ship with you. I don’t need them to be out of pocket for the extra cost.”

  “So, I can post for secondary cargos, but I’m guessing none of them are big enough to justify being the primary?”

  “No,” Van Der Merwe admitted. “That one took more arranging, but there’s several multi-million-ton cargos of processed metals that the interim government is sitting on. There are a lot of contracts the government shipping broker is going to have to default on, so they’ve been waffling over whose contracts to fill.

  “Since we need a cargo to Amber, that helps make the decision. There’s a five-million-ton order outstanding from Amber for supplies for the Amber Defense Cooperative. Given the Protectorate’s general opinion of Amber, it would normally be one of the last contracts we’d fill, but in the circumstances…”

  “I get to haul metal to the cooperatives,” David concluded. “Put them in touch with me, Director, and we’ll make it happen.

  “And then once in Amber, I’ll start poking in dark corners. Let’s hope I find Seule and not poisonous snakes.”

  David spent the evening officially “looking for cargo,” trawling the usual sites and contacts even while making sure not to accept any actual work. Given Red Falcon’s size and armament, he could justify charging rates that would price out most of the market—he didn’t usually, since her speed meant he could do twice as many contracts in the same time as most ships.

  It made it easy to look like he was holding out for a good job until the next morning, when the Governor’s office contacted him. He recognized the mousy, plain-looking man who appeared on his screen as the aide that had entered Governor Red Fox’s office at the end of their meeting.

  “Greetings, Captain Rice. I am Mikael Riordan, one of the Governor’s aides,” he introduced himself.

  “Greetings, Mr. Riordan.” David considered. “I’m correct in remembering that you were part of the Freedom Wing?”

  Riordan laughed carefully.

  “That’s one way of putting it,” he agreed. “I was a rabble-rouser, really, not all that close to the center of things until Hand Montgomery came along. That young man changed my life.”

  “You’re not the only one,” David murmured. “How’s Damien doing? He used to be my Ship’s Mage.”

  The aide paused, clearly considering his words carefully.

  “Hand Stealey’s death shook him, I think, though I can’t pretend I know him well,” Riordan finally answered. “I know I never want to get on his wrong side. I was in the background when he stormed Vaughn’s command center. There’s a vast gap, Captain Rice, between understanding that our antimatter supplies come from Transmuter-certified Mages—and watching a Hand use matter-antimatter transmutation as a weapon.”

  David shivered.

  “I didn’t think that was possible,” he noted.

  “My impression is that the Hands don’t subscribe to anyone else’s ideal of ‘possible’…and Lord Montgomery is no exception. He was injured while he was here, but he recovered. I don’t know if his…heart, I suppose, healed so well.

  “But I trust the Mage-King to have the best counselors and to understand what is needed after the death of a mentor.”

  “So do I,” David agreed. “What did you need from me, Mr. Riordan?”

  “The Ardennes government was the major broker for a massive trade syndicate running on Ardennes,” Riordan told him. “We’re still going through the books related to this—and it seems like a lot of money went astray—but…the fact is that we find ourselves responsible for completing a vast number of shipments of materials and goods.

  “At the same time as we are sanctioning, dismantling, or otherwise penalizing most of the companies that made up that syndicate,” he concluded. “Fulfilling all of those contracts will simply not be possible, but we will be able to fill some of them.

  “One of those orders is for the Amber Defense Cooperative, who have now made it clear that they will proceed with legal action if the cargo doesn’t arrive within the next seven days.”

  Riordan smiled mirthlessly.

  “Forty-two light-years, Captain. Six-million-ton cargo. Can you load and deliver in seven days?”

  “I have four Mages aboard, Mr. Riordan. We can move twelve light-years a day without even asking them to pretend they’re still in the Navy. A day on each side for sublight travel. That’s five and a half days, give or take. How quickly can you get your cargo to me?”

  Six million tons was six hundred cargo containers. Even Red Falcon’s heavy-lift shuttles could only move four at a time.

  “Two-thirds are in orbit, but our surface-to-orbit transshipment capability is…limited,” Riordan admitted. “And, frankly, we have higher-priority uses for it. The station has the gear to load that portion of the cargo in twenty-four hours. The other two hundred containers are near Nouveau Versailles.”

  Red Falcon had ten heavy-lift shuttles…and ten shuttles that could lift a single container each. Fifty containers at a shot would call for four lifts.

  “An orbit-surface-orbit flight for my people is a four-hour process,” David noted. “Loading onto our cargo spars is another two hours. That’s twenty-four hours, if you want to hire my shuttles and crews.”

  Kelzin would complain. That would be a brutal schedule, even with his pilots able to catnap throughout most of the flight down and up.

  Riordan sighed.

  “You’ve got me over a barrel, Captain, and anything you care to charge is going to be cheaper than the ADC’s lawyers are going to hand us. Name your price.”

  David grinned. He wasn’t going to be too mean, but despite the MISS’s involvement, he still preferred to make a profit.

  He’d want to retire someday, after all.

  Kelly LaMonte sat on the hill above the shuttle pad and watched the sun go down on her homeworld for what she suspected would be the last time. Beneath her, the immense ten-thousand-ton cargo containers were being tracked into position for the next pickup.

  That would be her pickup as well. She’d asked Mike to drop her off down here when they’d come down for the first flight, but she wasn’t going to add any additional trips for her own benefit. She’d even been working from her wrist-comp.

  Sort of, at least.

  She hadn’t been sure why she’d come down when she’d asked her boyfriend for the ride, but she knew now.

  She’d come down to Ardennes to say goodbye and to watch the sun set over purple forests one last time. There hadn’t been much drawing her back home before her grandfather’s death—and there was nothing now.

  “Ma’am?” one of the security guards said quietly behind her. She turned to look at the young man. He was one of the Marines seconded to the interim government, the replacements for a local police and military no one was sure they could trust yet.

  “Yes, Corporal?”

  “The call just came in. The shuttles are on approach and have entered the upper atmosphere. Thirty minutes or so.”

  “Thank you,” she told him, mentally judging. Loading would be another half-hour, but she was easily ten minutes’ walk from where she needed to board the shuttles.

  With a sigh, Kelly LaMonte turned her gaze back to the purple hillside and gave her homeworld one last sad smile.

  “Then let’s get going,” she told the Marine. “As the old sailors used to say, the tide waits for no man—and as every merchant shipper ever understands, we have a cargo to deliver.”

  11

  With the Azure Legacy and the attached bounty on his head lo
ng gone now, David didn’t find his ship getting jumped on every flight. It was still a relief to make a journey between star systems without even a blip, and he spent most of the trip to Amber watching his sensors like a mother hen.

  They arrived in the star system exactly on schedule, and David took in the now-familiar shape of the system. They’d come in closer than usual, emerging inside the asteroid belt outside the fifth planet and barely a day’s flight from Amber itself.

  The shipyard complexes in orbit around the planet were expanding again, he noted. They were far rougher frameworks than you would see in other Protectorate systems. Amber’s Prime Cooperatives, the closest thing the system had to a government, enforced the bare minimum of Protectorate rules and regulations to prevent the Mage-King coming down on them with the full force of the Charter.

  The system served as something of a safety valve for the Protectorate. The people who were convinced that all government was bad and that the old libertarians had things right moved there…and the people who decided that they preferred not having to pay road tolls to private corporations to leave their houses moved away.

  “Is that a new destroyer?” Jeeves asked quietly as the scan data came in. “That’s quite the investment for the ADC.”

  The Amber Defense Cooperative ran the security forces that protected Amber. Paying for a membership reduced a number of fees charged for traveling around the system and helped support the mutual defense. Membership in the three Prime Cooperatives—Defense, Medical, and Judicial—was the criterion Amber used for Citizenship.

  David was there often enough that he now had those memberships. He saved enough on docking fees for it to be worth it.

  And, apparently, his membership fees had allowed the ADC to double their jump-capable ship strength. Osiris, the flagship of the ADC, was an old ex-Navy ship with its amplifier matrix downgraded. Orbiting next to her now, though, was a brand-new Tau Ceti–built “export” destroyer.