Refitting older ships took time, and old destroyers were at the bottom of the priority list. Roslyn figured a ship like Unrelenting Pursuit was likely to be scrapped before she received an FTL communicator.
“Once we’ve called home, let’s get messages fired off to Cardinal-Governor Guerra and Mage-Captain Mac Gille Fhaolain,” Daalman continued, the Gaelic name coming far more smoothly off her tongue than Roslyn figured she could manage.
“The locals know we’re coming, but there’s only one Link on the whole planet and it’s Republic-built,” the Captain noted. “Regular radio, please.”
The RMN might be comfortable enough with the Links they’d built and the Republic might be dead…but they were not going to connect their FTL communication network with the one the Republic had built.
There were interfaces used to integrate the old Republic network with the new civilian network, but small as the risk was, the RMN had chosen not to take it.
“Command confirms our arrival,” Zaman noted. His boss, Lieutenant Commander Frost, was off-duty, leaving the noncom as the senior coms person on deck. “Sending standard greetings to Cardinal Guerra and Mage-Captain Mac Gille Fhaolain.”
“And now we wait,” Daalman murmured. “Lieutenant Ambrogi?”
The shaven-headed officer at the navigation console turned their head to face the Captain.
“Sir?”
“Do you have a course for Sorprendidas?”
“Yes, sir,” the junior navigator confirmed. “ETA three hours, eleven minutes.”
“All right. Make it so, Lieutenant,” Daalman ordered. “Let’s go meet the locals.”
With Daalman holding down the watch and a clear lack of threats in the Sorprendidas System, Roslyn was able to retreat to her office after an hour or so. It was helpful, in her admittedly biased opinion, that all of her superiors were also Jump Mages and understood exactly how wiped she was after jumping.
Even with the exhaustion from jumping, a Mage could still only actually sleep for eight to ten hours a day, so they ended up doing work in a manner best described with the ancient aphorism of “puttering.”
Amidst the paperwork she was going through for her own department, she pulled together the information she had on the missing MISS agents. Four had gone into Sorprendidas in the last nine months. Two men, one woman, one genderqueer.
The genderqueer agent, she at least knew what had happened to. Against a background of three other agents ceasing to report, the car accident was suspicious as hell. Isi Yuan had been hit by a drunk driver and died before they’d even reached the hospital.
They’d been following up on the research done by Pallavi Rose. Rose had been on Sorprendidas since before the war, a long-term surveillance asset. She’d been the one to identify Dr. Finley when information on the Rune Wright had gone out to every agent to track his movements.
Rose had flagged Finley as having repeatedly visited the planet and had even identified several businesses he’d been working with. Only part of that list had managed to make it back to Mars before Rose had stopped reporting.
Yuan’s investigation had been intended, at least partially, to find out what had happened to Rose.
Timur Spiker had left Tau Ceti barely twenty-four hours after the MISS office there had learned of Yuan’s death. By the time he’d arrived, at least, the Link on Sorprendidas had been interfaced with the civilian Link network in the Protectorate so he could send some reports.
Not many though, Roslyn saw. There was only so much access a covert agent could get to an expensive and still heavily-controlled communication device.
Spiker had sent in three reports in four weeks and then gone silent. A fourth agent had already been dispatched to support him, though Angus Killough had arrived to find himself alone. The initial report Roslyn had from him sounded shaky.
Killough had been more careful with his reports than Spiker, sending them in once a month after his arrival report. They’d gone through an encrypted drop box in the civilian network, buried in the corporate reports of several different Tau Ceti-based corporations that probably didn’t even know they were being used for MISS coms.
His last report had been five weeks earlier. More MISS assets were supposed to be deployed, per the notes she had from the Prince-Regent. None were expected to be in the system for another few weeks, at least, but they would make covert contact with her once they did.
Roslyn sighed and shook her head.
“They’re all dead,” she muttered grimly. “Someone is killing our people.”
She probably shouldn’t be talking to herself about this, but she was tired. Sighing, she shook her head and pulled up another document. This one gave her a list of virtual classified sites running on Sorprendidas and specific messages that would be posted as emergency alerts.
It would take some finagling to get archives from those sites, but even from half a light-minute out, Roslyn could access the planetary datanet. She told her computer to pull those classifieds and grabbed herself a coffee as they downloaded.
She wasn’t entirely surprised that there were no calls for help concealed in the ads she pulled. Whatever was going on on this planet, somebody had made very sure that all of the MISS agents who’d gone in to investigate it were dead.
That meant Roslyn needed to talk to people—because she was feeling far from suicidal, and that meant she was investigating with Marines.
8
“You asked to see me, Lieutenant Commander?” Daalman asked as Roslyn entered the Captain’s office.
Daalman had made more of an imprint on her office in the months they’d been aboard than Roslyn had. Song of the Huntress’s commissioning seal of a bow with a music note hanging above it was emblazoned on the wall behind her desk. Simple plastic bookshelves marked one wall, filled with an assorted array of nonfiction, reports and novels.
Pride of place on the wall that had
