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

T
o say
that my father and I didn’t always see eye to eye was like saying the sun was warm. It was both obvious, and an understatement.

We worked well together, when we needed to. When there was a crisis.

And the rest of the time? Well, we’ve never been a really quiet family.

“And if I don’t want to go to earth?” I shouted back.

My father glared at me for a moment before replying. His face was set like granite. “Thomas, this is important. There’s no one else I can ask to do this.”

“Of course there are,” I said. “We have lots of company people here on Mars. Any of them would be better suited than I am.”

“It is my company. Is it too much to ask that my son help take up the reins?” he asked.

Since he’d been barred from returning himself, Dad wanted me to go to Earth and take over the direct day-to-day operations of Stein Industries there. It was a great offer, don’t get me wrong. There were tons of people in the company who would love the job he was trying to give me. I just wasn’t one of them.

“I belong in space, Dad,” I said. “Didn’t I prove that, these past couple of months? And today?”

Station security had taken my prisoner into custody and cleaned up the mess. The entire station was in an uproar over the event, though. The device really had been a bomb, and nobody seemed to know how it had been smuggled aboard the station. Security was saying they were going to turn the place inside out before they were done. An attack like this was a nightmare. And the worst thing was that we all knew it was probably just a taste of things to come.

“You did very well,” he said. He sighed, and looked down at his hands. “But Thomas, I need your help with this.”

I looked at my father for a moment. I mean, really looked. The events of the last few months had taken their toll. I could see the stress etched on his face. He was working harder than anyone else I knew. And nobody on Mars was slacking off. There was too much to do. And too little time. But that was why I wanted to be there! And not be shipped off someplace else. It wouldn’t be the first time my father had sent me someplace out of the way when he knew trouble was brewing. He seemed to make a habit of it.

“I want to help, Dad,” I said. “But how many other experienced combat captains do you have? How long before Earth sends a fleet against us? You’re going to need every experienced hand, here on Mars.” Inside I was asking how many times did I need to prove myself to this man? The first sign of trouble and he was back to protecting me like I was a child.

“I think we have time,” he said. “How long? That I don’t know. And that is the real reason I need you on Earth.”

That got my attention in a hurry. The surprise must’ve shown on my face. He smiled, a crooked grin that lit up his face for a moment and shed most of the old stress lines.

“What, did you think I was sending you off skylarking?” He said. He laughed. “Thomas, I need you to take this job because I can’t trust anyone else to do it right.”

I was silent for a moment. That was a lot to take in. It would be a real change, if my father were actually sending me into danger instead of shipping me off as far away from it as possible. Was this for real, though? My father the admiral, my father the strategist? You never could tell just what he was up to. He usually had more than two reasons for everything he did.

“You’re right,” he went on. “Earth is going to come at us. They can’t yet, because they need uranium from Mars for their fission reactors. War with Mars would make Earth a very dark place, very quickly. But they’re putting everything they can into researching alternate sources for power.”

“And as soon as they have them, you figure they’re coming for us,” I said.

“They have to. The United Nations can’t let Mars maintain independence. Our colonies in space are the future of humanity. The UN knows that.”

I still didn’t want to do this, but he was winning me over. And he knew it, damn him. I had to hand it to my father. He knew how to make people agree to do what he wanted. Then again, he’d had years of practice ordering people around. I sighed with full drama.

“So what is it you need me to do?” I asked.

“On the record? Run the company Earth side. I’ll continue to direct all our space and Mars based operations, but we have a lot of infrastructure on Earth. Keep it safe and running smoothly.”

“And in reality?” OK, he knew all the right buttons to push. I was even starting to get a little excited about the cloak and dagger concept.

“We need good intel. On anything related to the UN’s space program, weapons development, and the fusion reactor program they’re pouring so much money into.”

“Can I bring Kel?” I asked. I hadn’t seen her in a bit. She was working on another project for my Dad, something about training new pilots. I couldn’t have thought of a better person for the job, but it meant we saw a lot less of each other than I’d have liked. Besides, I needed someone I could trust along with me.

“I need her where she is for a bit longer,” he said. “But when I can send her along, I will. Fair?”

“Fair. One flaw in your plan though. What makes you think they’re going to let me anywhere near that sort of information?” I asked.

Dad was persona non grata on Earth: exile was the punishment the court had dished out. I wasn’t banned from going back. But I was his son. I wasn’t going to be the most popular person in some circles, either. At the very least, I’d be seen as a serious security leak.

“Oh, we’re going to have a major falling out, you and I,” my father said. “You’re going to leave this office shouting at me. I’m forcing you back to Earth against your will.”

I wasn’t sure that would be enough. But it might be a start. “So I go to Earth and start snooping around?”

His smile vanished. My father’s lips faded to a thin grim line. “You go to Earth. I don’t think you’re going to need to snoop much, Thomas. I think the players there will come to you.”

I
rubbed
my eyes for the hundredth time. It didn’t make them feel any better. I wasn’t getting enough sleep, and that wasn’t good. If I was tired, I might miss something. And if I missed something, it might kill all of us. Too many balls in the air, each of them of vital importance. Dropping any of them would be lethal.

Sleep would have to wait. I nodded to George’s secretary, who smiled back in a tight-lipped way. Apparently not everyone here was fond of me. I kept my own smile to myself. Probably the result of my barging in on the Governor of Mars one too many times. Or President-Elect, now. We’d held elections. George had won easily, and I was glad. He was a good man, able to make hard decisions quickly and with wisdom. I had a feeling we were going to need more people like him soon enough.

George was in his office, staring out through a huge window into space. Outside, the steady flow of traffic that was the lifeblood of the Mars colony zipped by. I’d caught him looking out there more than once. It was a terrific view, but his bright eyes snapped up to meet mine as soon as I walked through the door. He was a big man, a shade on the heavy side but not gone all the way soft. Nobody survived in what was basically a frontier without being fairly fit. The quick mind behind those eyes was more what I was interested in, anyway.

“And how’s my Naval Chief of Staff today?” George asked.

I winced. I hated the title. But I’d taken it, because it gave me the authority to do the things that needed to happen. Mars needed a space navy badly. We had far too few people with real combat experience, and far too little time to work with.

“I’m fine. Any word about the prisoner?” I asked.

“Thomas gone?”

“Yes, I saw him off yesterday.” I hoped that I’d done the right thing. Thomas wasn’t one to keep his head down. I knew that sending him back to Earth was likely to stir up something of a hornet’s nest there. But Mars was getting hazardous. If he hadn’t happened across those saboteurs…! The whole station might have been blown to bits. At the very least, it would have been smashed up badly enough that we’d waste months repairing it. “The prisoner?” I repeated.

George frowned. “Being damned tight-lipped. He’s a recent arrival from Earth. Immigrated here on a regular work visa. Nothing about his background that looks odd. No connections to known terror or criminal groups. Hell, Nick - the man doesn’t even have a history of a speeding ticket. And neither did his partner. I smell a rat.”

“Their records have been scrubbed, then,” I said.

“Pretty damned sure,” George replied.

That took money or power. Maybe both. Everyone’s personal information was stored in huge official databases. They were highly secure computer systems, but law enforcement could check out everything about your history. Friends, family, where you lived, who you worked for - it was all an open book. This guy should have had something on his record. And even if one of them was lucky enough to have never been pulled over for speeding, I doubted both had.

Someone had cleaned up their records, carefully edited them to be bland and useless.

“Of course, that tells us who sent them,” I said. “They pretty much have to be from the UN. I doubt anyone else has both the power and the motive to hit us like that.”

“Yes. But it doesn’t do us any good unless we can prove it,” George said. “Which we can’t, because they have no records indicating any contact with UN officials of any kind.”

“So they wanted us to know who sent them, but to not be able to do anything about it.” I chuckled a little. “It’s a cute game they’re playing.”

“It’s not cute. It’s damned dangerous.”

“Not really, George. I read the report. Those two would-be terrorists were not that big a threat,” I said. “Sure, they had a bomb - but security gave it a one in five chance of actually going off, and it didn’t have enough power to penetrate the armor around the Constellation’s fission engine anyway. There was never any real danger.”

“That bothers me even more than the rest,” George said. “The two men Thomas caught were so damned incompetent. If they’d been trained military men with better hardware, we might have been blown to bits. But someone went to a lot of time and trouble to get those two loons up here. Why?”

I pondered that for a moment. He was right. The expense and risk involved in scrubbing those records was no small thing. If you were going to take that sort of risk, it made sense to do it for your best men. Why waste all that effort on incompetents?

The answer was obvious. “George. We need to get you out of here. Now.”

“What?” He stood up. “Why?”

I grabbed his arm. “No time. We’ve got to move!”

There was only one reason to invest so much money and effort into an obvious effort that was doomed to fail spectacularly. There had to be another cell. A second set of terrorists. And I was betting they were the highly trained sort.

George followed along, picking up the pace at the urgency in my tone. I barreled through the double doors of his office and out into the waiting room. His secretary wasn’t there. We raced through the small room to the doors that would let us out. I could almost feel the jaws of a trap closing around us.

The door was locked. And I felt the jaws shut tight.

“Shit,” George breathed. He reached for his wrist com.

“Stop. No calls. We don’t know who’s listening,” I said.

I was carrying a pistol these days. I pulled it out and aimed it at the lock on the doors. Three quick shots later I heard a whining noise from somewhere inside the thing. It was an electronic lock - I had to hope I’d damaged it enough. I shoved against the door again. It moved slowly, metal grating on metal. I’d damaged the lock and the motor as well.

“When we get outside the door, we make for my courier,” I said. “I need to get you someplace safe.”

The door was open far enough. I thought to check the hall before we went out. Just in case. It was a good thing I was feeling extra cautious. Bullets flashed by my face and I ducked back into the room. I couldn’t see the shooter and didn’t need to see him to know he was a pro. We were not going to get out that way.

“Trapped?” George asked.

“Go ahead and use your wrist com now,” I said. He called for security. I was damned sure they wouldn’t arrive in time. The enemy knew we were trying to get out. Whatever they were attempting, it was going to happen any second now.

“George, is there any other way out of here?” I asked.

He shook his head. I stalked back into his office and glared through the plexiglass screen. That gave me the inkling of an idea.

“You have emergency suits in here, right?” I asked.

“Of course,” George said. He pointed at a cabinet. “Every major section of the station has them.”

I opened the thing and hauled out two suits. “Get it on.”

“This won’t save us from a blast,” he said.

He was right, but I was thinking of something else. Why hadn’t the blast happened yet? What was the holdup? I was sure there had to be a bomb. And if there were, I’d have blown it as soon as my target’s nose showed through the door. So why hadn’t they?

I scanned the space outside. A ship was just gliding away from the station. Ironically, it was one of my ships, and I knew just what was inside it. It carried a full load of uranium. A massive shipment, the last part of a big deal we’d hammered out with the UN. We had to keep supplying them with the fuel they needed, or they’d get desperate and attack before we were ready. But we’d won some serious concessions from them in return. I’d had to shuffle its launch from yesterday to today, so that I could fit Thomas’s courier into the launch schedule.

Now that ship - with a good year’s supply of uranium on board - was pulling away from the station, bound for Earth. That had to be it. They were making absolutely sure that the cargo got clear. It was supposed to have left yesterday. If it had, George and I would both be dead already.

We had seconds left. A minute tops, until it was far enough away they felt safe to set off their bomb. I snapped the helmet of my emergency suit onto my head. George already had his on.

I scanned the room, and my eyes found what I was looking for. Fire was deadly in space, so we had all sorts of redundancies to deal with it. Sprinklers of course, but they don’t work if something happened to the station’s spin. So we had special fire extinguishers, which did a great job with gravity or without. I snatched one from where it hung on the wall and aimed the nozzle at the edge of the window, where it met the bulkhead. The window was tough stuff, but junctions between materials were always the weakest link. I pulled the trigger and expelled a long, sustained blast from the extinguisher. Frost crisscrossed over the hard material.

That window was made out of transparent aluminum. It was designed to handle even impacts from micrometeorites. It would shrug off bullets without doing more than scratching it. But I had a heavy caliber pistol that I was betting was tougher than the frozen joint. I pressed the muzzle carefully near my target, just outside the blast of the extinguisher.

I fired. The round ricocheted away.

“Get behind me,” I said.

“What the hell, Nick?” George shouted. But he complied.

I turned on my radio and set it to broadcast on the emergency channel to the station. “All hands, emergency. Prepare for decompression.” I should have done that a while ago. Might still save some lives, but how many would die in the blast I knew was coming?

Then I started shooting again. I fired three more times, hoping I wasn’t going to get my hand shot off by a ricochet. The last shot went through! I was rewarded with the hiss of air escaping the room. The station’s systems detected the leak. Alarms blared, the lights all went red, and blast doors slammed down over the exit. The bad guys weren’t going to come in after us - and the extra protection might help against the bomb.

If it wasn’t right in the room with us, anyway. For all I knew, it might be.