His old bodyguard had filled in some of the gaunt hollowness and stress lines on her face. She didn’t look relaxed per se but certainly the most content he’d ever seen her.
“More than I expected,” she admitted. “Can’t say I don’t miss pulling your butt out of the fire on a weekly basis, though. It was never boring.”
“Neither is running a planet, as Julia and I are discovering,” Riordan added. He inclined his head to Denis Romanov. “Agent Romanov, I hear we have you to thank for the Hand still being with us. At least, oh, half a dozen times.”
“That’s the job,” the Marine murmured. “Julia taught me well.”
“Most of my staff is still in Tau Ceti or Sol,” Damien told the two Ardennians. “Or scattered to the eight corners of the galaxy. I certainly didn’t need a staff while in physical rehab, and my decision to get involved in the Korma mission was entirely out of the blue.”
He shrugged.
“I was in Tau Ceti, and we learned they needed help. The bauble cut a lot of bullshit out of the way.” He tapped the closed-fist symbol of his office, the only platinum Hand in the Protectorate right now.
Only three had ever been made, and the first two had been vaporized and buried with their holders, respectively.
Damien did not expect to die in bed. But then, it had been a long time since he’d expected that.
“The attack in Korma leaves me nervous,” he continued. “I’m hoping you’ve found the time to go over the RTA logs?”
“I found the time to have people do it and brief me, at least,” Amiri told him with a sigh. “There’s no smoking guns, Damien, but not everyone talks to Ardennes. We’re one MidWorld of twenty-plus, after all.”
“And?” he asked. “I know that sigh, Julia.”
Riordan chuckled. It wasn’t an entirely humorous sound.
“We don’t hear from everyone on a regular basis, so it didn’t catch our notice until you asked us to look.” He slid a hand across the marble tabletop, revealing part of the surface to actually be a screen mimicking the surface of the stone. A holographic image of the Protectorate and Republic appeared above the table.
“Only nine of the MidWorlds and three of the Fringe Worlds have RTAs,” he reminded everyone. “At least, of the ones left after the Secession.” Four stars flashed orange. “Closer to the border with the Republic than us, though scattered along the length of it, are Santiago, Hoisin, Nia Kriti and Tormanda.
“We also usually see a degree of shipping from these systems.” Another five stars flashed pink.
“The shipping is the most definitive warning sign,” Amiri said quietly. “We don’t get a lot of ships from any one of those systems, but we haven’t seen cargos from any of them in a week.”
“And in the same time frame, we haven’t seen any RTA transmissions from those four systems,” Riordan concluded. “Any single piece of that isn’t unusual, Lord Montgomery, but…”
“But if you add it all up with the attack at Korma, there’s a pattern and I don’t like it,” Damien confirmed. He rested his hands on the table, careful to keep them motionless as he studied the map.
“I presume we’ve already made an attempt to make Transceiver contact with those systems?”
“It’s being done as we speak,” Amiri confirmed. “We’ll have an update for you within an hour or so.” She shook her head. “I wish we had better—or at least more useful—news.”
“Unless you could tell me with certainty that I was wrong and just being paranoid about the Republic, you couldn’t give me the news I want,” Damien admitted. “Almost regardless of what we get from the check-in, I need to take Duke and investigate. I’ll probably borrow escorts from the refueling station. We’re not used to gunships in those kinds of numbers.”
The married couple exchanged a glance, and Riordan made a “go ahead” gesture to his wife.
“We’ll want to reinforce you from the ASDF,” she told Damien. “We can spare a cruiser and a pair of destroyers. It’s a good chunk of our forces, but…we need to know, Damien. If the Protectorate is in danger from the Republic, Ardennes is going to be on the front lines.”
“I know,” he replied. “And if it’s bad as I’m starting to fear, I’ll be right here with you.”
“Lord Montgomery, this is Transceiver Mage Alanna O’Malley,” the Mage from the RTA introduced herself again over the video call.
“I remember you, Mage O’Malley,” Damien told her.
He was currently in the passenger compartment of a Royal Martian Marine Corps assault shuttle, about halfway out of Ardennes’s atmosphere.
“I was tasked by Governor Riordan with making contact with the RTAs along the border with the Republic, my lord,” she said. “He asked me to brief you on what I discovered.”
“I appreciate both your work and you taking the time to brief me,” Damien replied. “What did you discover?”
“Governor Riordan suggested that I try and ‘keep things casual,’” O’Malley said. “He didn’t want me to tip them off if something was wrong. It…wasn’t really necessary.”
“How so?” That didn’t sound promising for this to have been unnecessary.
“Nia Kriti and Tormanda are offline,” she said quietly. “It’s not that no one is responding, my lord. The Transceiver Arrays themselves have been destroyed.”
“Damn,” Damien murmured. “How can you tell?”
“There are ways, Lord Montgomery. Few outside of full-time Transceiver Mages would have been trained in them, but we can tell the difference between a lack of response and not being received at all. Nia Kriti and Tormanda are completely off the air.”
Runic Transceiver Arrays, gone. An RTA was a construction project to put orbital stations and interstellar battleships to shame, in complexity and difficulty if not size. The fastest construction of one on record was two and a half years, at Damien’s homeworld of Sherwood.
“That’s…” He stretched for any kind of description that could cover this news. “That’s a disaster.”
“That may be the better news, my lord,” O’Malley admitted. “Hoisin is not responding. The RTA is intact, but there is no one there to send a response. We wouldn’t let this happen if the Array was crewed, so I can’t help but feel that something terrible has happened to my compatriots in the Hoisin System.”
Damien nodded slowly, gesturing Romanov to him.
“Agent, can you bring up a map of the region?” he asked. The shuttle was not set up properly for his current needs. Fortunately, he had willing subordinates.
“What about Santiago?” he said to O’Malley.
“Santiago responded,” she told him. “But it felt…wrong. All of the key phrases and everything were correct, but I know the Transceiver Mage who answered.” She shook her head. “He was afraid, my lord. I think he was being watched and under threat if he betrayed any sign of trying to deceive his watchers.
“I fear for his safety and for the Santiago System…and the others. I don’t know what’s happened, Lord Montgomery.”
“Neither do I, Mage O’Malley,” he told her, looking over the map. As he’d thought, Santiago was the closest of the systems in question, twenty-six light-years away. Just over a day for a fully staffed Navy warship.
“What I can tell you, however, is that I’m going to find out,” he promised her. “And if I can save the Mages at Santiago, I will.”
18
Mage-Captain Jakab met Damien as he exited the shuttle onto Duke of Magnificence. Duke had been Damien’s ship for a long time, and he and the Captain had long since come to an agreement on ceremony and such when the Hand boarded or left the cruiser.
The main point of the agreement was that there wasn’t any such ceremony. Jakab had done an occasional end run around Damien on that point, but today wasn’t one of them. The Mage-Captain was alone and fell into step beside him with a quiet nod as Damien headed into the ship.
“You got my message,” Damien said. It wasn’t really a question. If t
he messages from an RMMC assault shuttle to her mothership weren’t getting through, then this whole game had gone even more to hell than he thought.
“I did. I spoke with Commodore Cruyssen as well.” Jakab shrugged. “Well, traded messages anyway. He’s a good three light-minutes away still.
“We’ll have the destroyers Bonnie Darling of Sherwood and Dance in Starlit Darkness joining us for our trip. They can micro-jump to us or meet us at the one-light-year point. Your call.”
“Have them micro-jump,” Damien ordered. “We’re also getting the cruiser Andes and two destroyers from the ASDF.” He shrugged. “I don’t know the destroyer names. We’ll find out.”
“I’ll get my people on that,” Jakab replied. “I’m guessing the locals are feeling twitchy, too?”
“I might be infectious,” Damien said dryly. “Six ships to Santiago, just over three days there and back with most of a day to poke around.”
“More than enough time to make sure the system is secure,” his Captain agreed. “But what if it isn’t?”
“If Santiago is in enemy hands, it’s already done,” Damien said. “The RTA appears to be under their control. The likelihood that the system is under siege or that we can even retake it is low. I hate to leave our people in the Republic’s hands, but if Santiago is fallen, we won’t be able to retake it with six ships.”
Jakab grimaced.
“That…is your call, I suppose.”
“It is,” Damien agreed with a sigh. “Coordinate with the locals and with the destroyer Captains. I want every ship commander aboard Duke of Magnificence this evening for a working supper. You and I need to know who we’re working with, and they need to know what I expect of them.”
“I’ll make it happen,” Jakab promised.
“You’re in command, obviously,” Damien told him. “Should I be making you a Commodore or something?”
Jakab chuckled.
“Won’t say I’d turn it down, but the Navy has always run on ‘who the Admiral says is in command’ rather than any real structure for task groups like this.”
From what Damien understood, that was true all the way down. The Royal Martian Navy had a surprising paucity of ranks compared to most organizations like it in history.
“Well, in this case, what the Hand says goes,” Damien said with a chuckle. “And the Hand thinks he’s dragged you from one end of the galaxy to the other. Have someone make sure the appropriate paperwork makes it to my office in a way I can authorize without signing.”
“My lord?”
“You’re a Commodore now,” Damien said with a vague gesture of his left hand. “Should have done that when I left you behind in Sol, but I half-expected the Navy to take care of it.”
Jakab sighed audibly.
“I was joking, my lord.”
“I know. But you’ve been my strong left arm for a while now, Kole, and if this mission to Santiago goes the way I’m afraid it’s going to, I’m going to need you to command Navy ships for me again in the future—and I cannot afford there to be confusion over who is in command.
“It will be you. Mage-Commodore Jakab.”
“Yes, my lord. Thank you, my lord.”
“Persephone! You’re not supposed to be in here!”
The scandalized tones of Damien’s steward were, he supposed, the entirely correct background to a black kitten darting under the man’s feet and leaping up onto the dining room table. The six officers had just sat down and had their drinks poured. Food hadn’t even made it out yet—his steward was carrying a bread basket—and now there was a kitten sprawled indelicately in the middle of the table.
“I’ve got her, Jeff,” Damien replied, starting to rise and reach for the cat. Unfortunately, his reach stretched his fingers just ever so slightly wrong, and he inhaled sharply as pain radiated down his hands.
Persephone was instantly up and next to him, gently nuzzling his hands as he tried not to audibly whimper.
“I’ve got her,” Jakab said quietly, giving Persephone a scratch behind the ears as he picked her up. She headbutted Damien’s shoulder as Jakab moved her, purring loudly as the Mage-Commodore took her out of the room and back to Damien’s office.
“My apologies, Captains,” Damien told the gathered strangers. Four women and a single man looked at him in confusion as Jakab closed the door and returned. “Persephone was a gift from Princess Kiera, strongly encouraged by my physical therapists.”
He waved his crippled hands in mute explanation.
“She has exactly the personality you would expect an animal imprinting on me to have,” he admitted with a chuckle. “Please, help yourselves. The main meal will be out shortly.”
Damien waited until they were distracted, then floated his glass of water up to his mouth to take a delicate sip. His hands most definitely did not have the fine dexterity for glassware or cutlery at this point.
If any of his guests noted that his hands remained on the table as he drank, they were too polite to say anything.
The food arrived before further conversation was needed, thick slices of some pastry concoction filled with chicken and vegetables and spices. Damien’s portion was precut, the explanation for anyone paying attention as to why the meal was in the style it was.
It was a lot easier for him to eat a meal contained in one dish than it was for him to use cutlery to eat multiple sides, for example.
Damien carefully levitated each piece of tart up so he could bite into them. Even after eating like this for a year and a half, he was still self-conscious about it. Nonetheless, his guests remained politely focused on their own meals until he finished eating.
Jeff Schenck, his steward, came through and filled wineglasses for everyone. Damien eyed his with a sigh, then reached out for it. He didn’t actually pick up the glass with his hand, though. More magic lifted the glassware as he rose and offered a toast.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Protectorate of the Mage-King of Mars.”
“The Protectorate,” they responded.
He looked around his companions. He knew Kole Jakab of old, and the newly-promoted Mage-Commodore was a brave, reliable man.
The two Royal Martian Navy Mage-Commanders were cut from similar cloth. To command destroyers at their current rank, both women had to be experienced, senior officers—and also skilled and trusted by their superiors.
Hanaa Boulos commanded Dance in Starlit Darkness. She wore a midnight-blue headscarf over pale blond hair that framed the usual faded parchment skin and mild epicanthic fold of the classic Martian mongrel. She was a descendant of the survivors of Project Olympus, Mars-born and raised among the traditions of an older culture.
Amelie Paternoster, the commander of Bonnie Darling of Sherwood, was actually a native of Ardennes. She was tall and slim with neatly braided waist-length blond hair. She was a Mage by Right to Boulos’s Mage by Blood, identified by the Royal Testers who checked every child in the Protectorate for the Mage Gift.
The three Ardennes Self-Defense Force officers were clearly even less comfortable than the junior Martian officers. They wore dark green uniforms in contrast to the black and gold of the Martian uniform, and seemed quite unsure how to deal with their crippled host.
“Captain Brandt,” Damien focused his gaze on the cruiser Captain, Liliana Brandt. “Do you and your fellow ASDF Captains have any questions before we get into more detailed planning?”
Everyone in the room was a Mage, but the three Militia officers had training closer to a traditional Jump Mage than the Navy officers’ far wider—and more dangerous—skillset.
Brandt considered the question for a moment, seeming to roll it around in her head. She was a petite woman with a dyed-green stripe running across her black hair.
Her two subordinates, Under-Captains Wobbe Kaluza and Unai Groos both had similar stripes, in red and purple respectively. Given that all three had otherwise identical hairstyles, Damien suspected there was a dress code rule with regards to hair in the ASDF.
> And since he suspected Julia Amiri regarded it with as much favor as her personnel did, that code was being stretched to the breaking point.
“We have not worked closely with the Navy before,” Brandt finally said, her voice slow and steady. “There is still some bad feeling between the survivors of the battle and the Navy, regardless of how necessary what happened was.”
“That’s to be expected, Captain,” Damien admitted. A lot of men and women wearing the uniform Brandt now wore had been killed by the Royal Martian Navy. They’d been ordered into battle by a commanding officer who’d committed crimes against humanity and, perhaps, should have refused those orders…but that didn’t change what had happened.
“I have to admit, I am unsure of our mission,” she continued after a few more moments of thought. “Santiago is a Protectorate System, and we are looking for Republic ships?”
“We have reason to believe the Republic may have attacked Santiago,” Damien told her. “It’s sufficiently fuzzy that I want to confirm it with direct observation before we take any drastic action.”
“That would be an act of war!” Kaluza replied, her voice shocked.
“And that, Under-Captain Kaluza, would be what I mean by ‘drastic action,’” Damien said dryly. “If Santiago has been attacked by the Republic, I have no choice but to assume that the other systems whose RTAs have gone silent have also been attacked.
“In which case, officers, we are already at war. We just haven’t been told that yet.”
Brandt swallowed.
“So, what do we do?”
“I believe you train with our tactics manual, correct?” Damien asked.
“We do,” she confirmed. “About a quarter of our officer instruction is by personnel temporarily seconded from the RMN.”
“All right. We’re going to launch a standard recon sweep,” he told them. “We go in at battle stations, with all hands on deck. I’d rather insult the locals and have to apologize than not be ready for a Republic counterstrike.
“If the Republic is present, we do everything within our power to ascertain their intentions and actions without engaging.” He grimaced. “Based off the forces we encountered in the Korma System, our force is insufficient to challenge the Republic Interstellar Navy’s new standard deployment group.”
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