Accord of Mars (Accord Series Book 2) (6 page)

T
he air car
Perrault ordered to take me back to my compound was driven by a taciturn old commander who looked like he was pissed from the moment I met him. Probably angry about playing chauffeur at his age and rank. I couldn’t blame him, and I welcomed the silence on the ride. I had a lot of thinking to do before I landed.

He radioed ahead shortly before we arrived to let security know we were inbound. I swear those were the only words he spoke the entire trip. He landed the car, barely spinning down the rotors enough for me to jump out. The door slammed shut behind me and he took off again, blasting me with dust.

Which was about how I felt overall, after the day I’d had. I’d hoped for something out of the meeting with Perrault. Some sort of information, a hint even about what the UN was plotting next. I suppose he had given me something. He’d told me to leave, which meant that as dangerous as my visit to Earth had been so far, he felt it was going to get a lot worse if I stuck around.

I walked back toward the compound building, trying not to feel dejected. Maybe it would be best to head for home. If the courier was repaired and refueled, we could be away from here in a flash. I found I missed being around people who weren’t trying to kill me. I felt like I was surrounded by enemies down here. It wasn’t fun.

Acres met me at the door. “Was worried about you, when the driver came back solo.”

“I sent him home,” I said.

“He told us. He also told us what happened up on the roof,” Acres said.

“I’ll fill you in on the gory details. I think it’s about time to get out of here, Chief.”

His eyebrows went up, but he didn’t comment. I tapped my watch. As soon as I was in range, it connected back into the local computer net. Another great piece of tech that I loved. My watch - and Dad’s - could do a lot more than most smartwatches could. While it was on my wrist and reading my biometrics, I had damned near unlimited access to any Stein computer system. It was a handy tool.

“Bolton? Meet Acres and I in the conference room, please,” I said into the device.

“Be right there, sir,” he replied, his voice tinny through the small speaker.

He was already waiting by the time Acres and I arrived, sitting in one of the chairs. A long table dominated the room. It had been designed for much larger meeting than this, but it would do.

“The room is clean?” I asked. If Choi had Perrault bugged, he certainly wouldn’t be above bugging my offices if he could.

“Just scanned it, sir,” Bolton replied. He held up a small box that looked a lot like the one Perrault had in his desk drawer. I had a hunch there were a lot of those being used these days.

I filled both men in on everything that had happened. My reception, Perrault showing up to rescue me, and our meeting afterward. Including the admiral’s warning that it was time to get the heck out of here.

“And I have the feeling he might be right,” I said. “I’m sensing hostility between the US and UN forces. There are ships in orbit that might be getting ready to head to Mars any day. And the entire UN building sounds like it’s one big bug-infested eavesdropping mess.”

“I dug up a few more bits while you were gone,” Acres said.

Bolton coughed politely.

“We dug up a few more things,” Acres amended with a growl. “Adam’s a good hand with a computer hack, it seems.”

“Legacy of a misspent youth,” he said with a small grin.

“I’m sure. Just using your powers for good now, hmm?” I asked.

“Of course, sir,” he replied, his voice bland.

I grinned. I liked the man. “What did you find?”

“Satellite pictures,” Bolton said. “Of the UN space dock.”

I gaped. “Nobody has those.” That had been a major problem for us. The UN was making damned sure that no satellites were swinging past the dock, precisely so that no pictures were taken. At all. Dad had every hacker and snoop he knew looking for a good shot of the place, but all he’d been able to get were pictures of a dull blob of metal from a long way away.

“It seems the US Air Force might have a few satellites lithe enough to slip past UN security after all,” Bolton said. He waved his hand, and the air above the table lit up with a holographic display. And there it was.

The UN space dock wasn’t what I’d pictured at all. I’d imagined something like Dad’s R&D station. A small hab unit, and a couple of berths in space that were basically a box of girders. You’d assemble the new ship inside the space of the girders. This was something else.

It was huge, first off. It was easily four times the size of Mars Station. But Mars Station was a big wheel that people lived in. Ships docked along the inside of the wheel, where the spin-induced artificial gravity was lowest. Mars Station could dock as many as a half dozen ships at a time inside the hollow of the wheel.

This station looked like most of it was taken up by docks. If there was a habitable area, it was only on the outer rim. The entire inside was taken up by a massive array of docking spaces, dozens of little boxes that a ship could slip into. Or be built in. And an awful lot of those little boxes looked like they had ships in them.

“How old is this image?” I asked, trying to count the occupied docks. There were at least sixteen that I could be sure of, but it looked like some of them might be half constructed still. The image was grainy, so it was hard to tell for certain.

“Time stamp was last month,” Bolton said.

“We need to get this information to Dad,” I said to Acres.

“There’s more,” Acres said. “I hit up some old Navy buddies. Seems like the UN is on a hiring spree.”

“Not surprising, if they’re building as many ships as it looks like they are,” I said.

“Yeah. But what is surprising is they aren’t just hiring ex-military. Scuttlebutt says the US Navy is loaning them some warm bodies, too,” he said. He took a deep breath and let it out. “And officers.”

I hissed in frustration. If that were true, then Perrault surely would have known about it. Which meant he deliberately hadn’t told me. What else hadn’t he said? Worse, if the US Navy was backing this new UN space force, how deep in it was Perrault himself? He was one of the few top ranking men with any experience in space. If I were looking for officers to recruit, he’d be right at the top of my list.

“He’s got to be in on it, then,” I said aloud.

“Perrault?” Acres replied. “Yeah, that’d be my bet, too.”

“Dad needs to know.”

“We can place a call to Mars, jet this info out to him,” Bolton said. “But even with good encryption, we don’t know who else might be able to intercept and decode it.”

“No, better to bring it ourselves. I think we’ve done enough here. This balloon is going to go up any time now,” I said. I thought about that a moment. All of the pieces were in place - why wasn’t Choi already making his move?

“What’s he waiting for?” I wondered aloud.

“An excuse?” Acres said. “He can’t just go declare war with no reason.”

“It wouldn’t take much more to manufacture one, now that your father is President of Mars,” Bolton said.

“What?” I asked.

“The media is all over it,” Bolton said. “Clarke was badly injured in the bombing. He’s alive, but until he’s healed up enough to take up his duties again, Mr. Stein has been named interim President.”

“Choi’s been all over it,” Acres growled. “Hinting that it was a military coup, and now the Mad Bomber is in charge of Mars - and the uranium, and the Mars fleet.”

“Damn it, Dad and I just saved this planet,” I said. “Are people believing his shit?”

“Earth got hammered by the attacks. Whole cities wiped out,” Bolton said grimly. “There’s a lot of scared people out there. It doesn’t take a lot of work to change someone from being afraid to being angry.”

My thoughts were racing. It was the perfect setup. By surviving, Dad was implicated in George’s injury. By taking charge like he usually did in a crisis, he was easy to use as Choi’s boogeyman. All the UN would need now is a spark. And a small spark is easy to manufacture.

My smartwatch chimed with an incoming message. I glanced down out of habit to check it, and froze. Of all the people I’d thought would be trying to contact me right now, he had to be lowest on the list. I stood staring at the message for a long moment.

“Thomas? What’s up?” Acres asked at last. “Who messaged you?”

“It’s Choi,” I replied. “He wants to meet.”

T
he chair wasn’t comfortable
. For the hundredth time, I shifted my weight in the seat, trying to achieve some relief. I knew it wasn’t the seat’s fault. It was mine. I wanted to be out of this office and back out in space where I belonged.

George’s desk - my desk, for the time being - was covered with paperwork. There was what seemed like a never-ending stream of tasks to accomplish. Fortunately I’d delegated most of it right back to the Council. They’d be the ones really governing Mars, at least until George was well enough to take the post again. I’d told Tabby as much, when she insisted I take on the title of President.

“No shit,” she’d replied. We’d let the matter rest at that.

I looked across at my new chief aide - Keladry Flynn. I still wasn’t sure when she’d become my right hand, but damned if she wasn’t. There were only so many people I could trust completely to have my back, to be on my side no matter what happened. Flynn gave me that feeling. Her quick wit and inability to keep her mouth shut when she disagreed with superior officers would have sunk her in some Navies. But not in mine.

It was much easier to see why Thomas had been so smitten with her, now that I’d worked with her for a while. If we all survived this mess, I was going to owe him an apology. I smiled ruefully. It wasn’t every day that I was so completely wrong about someone.

“You’ve screwed this one up by the numbers, haven’t you?” Flynn asked me.

“What?” I was startled. Her question had tracked entirely too close to what I’d been thinking about, and I wasn’t sure what she was referring to at first.

She pointed at the tablet she held. “This data says we’re fucked. Admiral.” She added the last word as an afterthought. But at least she had added it.

“We were pretty sure that we had more time. Something has changed. Some factor we weren’t considering before.” Personally, I thought they’d simply managed to get the experimental cold fusion reactors running much more quickly than anyone had estimated. “But why doesn’t matter. What we should be looking at is what to do with the situation.”

“What we can bring to defend against an attack?” she asked.

“Yes. Worst case - suppose they launch their ships right now. What have we got?” I knew the numbers by heart. I’d been over them a few times in my head already. But it never hurt to get a second person working the problem.

She studied the tablet a few moments. “We have no assets at Mars except my Hawk. Everything else is at the R&D station.”

“Which is only a few hours away. We can bring the ships here long before anything arrives from Earth,” I said.

“The Defender and Excalibur are under refit in the R&D station, and the Constellation is at Mars Station for refit,” she said, ticking off her fingers as she named them off. “They can be ready in a few weeks. But I don’t think we have that long.”

“Which leaves the Hermes,” she said. “And the rest of the Hawks.”

“Yes,” I said, smiling.

“I don’t know why you’re grinning. If they launch tomorrow, we have one ship. Against at least six.”

I noted that she wasn’t underestimating the size of the enemy fleet. They’d let us know there were six ships by buying the six astrogation packages from Stein Industries. That didn’t mean they only had six ships. Rather, it implied they wanted us to think they had six ships. They might have only two, if they were trying to make their fleet seem bigger than it really was. They might have a dozen.

My line of thinking was veering toward the higher end of the scale. They’d attacked Mars Station and tried to kill Thomas when he went to Earth. They were coming at us soon, which meant they felt confident they had enough ships to do the job. Enough to take out the three ships they knew I had, plus whatever else I’d been able to cobble together.

“I’m smiling because you are right. You are dead on target,” I said. “In terms of raw ships, we’re grossly outnumbered. I took a risk when I threw all our production effort into the Hermes instead of concentrating on the other ships first.”

I punched some keys on the desk, and a display lit up. “Look at the graph.”

It showed our production rate - how many combat ready ships Mars could have ready versus how many Earth could prepare, over time. I’d built this graph right after we’d returned home to Mars, when I was still trying to figure out how we were going to keep this fledgling democracy alive.

There was an immediate spike on the Mars side of the graph: three ships, the three we already had, being repaired. And we’d done quick fixes on all three, because we knew some of the pirate vessels had escaped. We had to be ready in case they struck again.

Earth’s line showed no growth at all for three months. Then the line shot upward. A year in, and Earth had a theoretical production of three dozen ships. After two years, they could have as many as three score. In contrast, Mars might have been able to produce a dozen ships in the same time.

“We were always outmatched. There are about eight billion people living on Earth. They can afford to burn more resources than we can,” I said.

“So you built Hermes,” she replied.

“That’s why I built Hermes, yes. There are only a few people who’ve fought a battle in space and lived. Most of them are here with us,” I paused. “I am counting on the generals and admirals of Earth to fulfill an old military adage.”

“And what’s that?” she asked.

“Generals are always condemned to fight the last war,” I said. “We have to be better than that. We need to win this war.”

I stood up. It felt good to be out of the chair. “Computer, display system map,” I said.

The visual flashed out and came back with a three dimensional display of local Mars space. It showed the planet, the moons - and my hidden station. I traced a line through the image, and it glowed red where my finger passed, connecting the station and Mars with a swooping arc.

“I want you to go bring the Hermes back here,” I said. “All of the Hawks as well. Make it a long, slow course. Earth might see her depart the station. I’m sure they’ve discovered where it is by now. But I don’t want them to know precisely where she is. Bring her into a wide orbit around Mars.”

“I can do that,” Flynn said, standing. “Anything else?”

I shook my head. “I’d say ask them to hurry repairs on the other ships, except I already know they’re working as fast as they can.” I had a feeling there simply wasn’t going to be time to get them into the fight.

I could see her wanting to ask about Thomas. I needed her head in the game on this. The last thing I wanted was for her to go dashing off to his rescue. Time to take some of the worry off her mind.

“I’m going to call Earth,” I said. “See if I can defuse things, slow Choi down. And I think it’s time to bring Thomas home. We’re going to need him here.”

Her shoulders relaxed. Fractionally, but I noticed it. It warmed me a little to be able to give her at least that much.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll bring her back here for you,” she said.

She left, and I sat down in the damned chair again, thinking about sand passing through an hourglass, faster every moment.