Mountain of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

“That gives you a large amount of influence in the Council, but you are also now Lord Regent, which makes you the voice for Desmond’s successor. We need to know what you are planning and, well, who you are, before we decide if we will continue supporting you as we supported His Majesty.”

  Damien considered Ayodele’s words as he took a mouthful of soup.

  “I am not Desmond Michael Alexander,” he finally said. “I am also not Kiera Michelle Alexander. I am Kiera’s Regent, but I have every intention of consulting her on major decisions.

  “I was Desmond’s top troubleshooter and he was my mentor,” he continued. “While I tend to presume I will support what he supported, that is not entirely guaranteed.

  “Certainly, His Majesty and I shared a fundamental view of the purpose of the Protectorate of Mars: that the name defined what we are and what we must do,” Damien told them. “What purpose is our Protectorate if we do not protect people? That above all else defines us.”

  He smiled and took another spoonful of soup.

  “I don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for, Councilor, but it’s my starting point as it was Desmond’s. Beyond that, well, I guess the point of this meal is for the three of us to get to know each other better. I’ll admit, Councilor, that I’ve never been to Africa. Tell me about it.”

  Ayodele laughed.

  “I can hear him in your words, do you know that?” he asked. “I suspected Desmond had picked carefully. I now begin to suspect he may also have picked well.

  “As for Africa, Lord Regent, I am from Nigeria, specifically the city of Lagos. Do you know it?”

  13

  By the time his first full day as Lord Regent came to a close, Damien was ready to do nothing but fall over. But he’d told Denis Romanov to arrange the meeting with the maintenance chief for Desmond Alexander’s shuttle, so he returned to his office for the second time that day instead of heading to his apartment.

  The space set aside for him in the Mountain had been permanently his, but it would have taken a visitor under ten seconds to guess that it wasn’t an office the owner used much. There was a framed, hand-painted portrait of Admiral Grace McLaughlin of the Sherwood Interstellar Patrol on the wall, an addition Damien wasn’t even sure of the source of, and that was it for personal decoration.

  The portrait of his girlfriend had probably been intended as a surprise gift, and the answer to who had sent it was probably buried in his messages somewhere. He was reasonably sure it wasn’t from Grace herself, which meant it was either from Desmond or the McLaughlin himself, the Governor of Sherwood and Grace’s grandfather.

  It struck him as Governor Miles McLaughlin’s idea of an encouraging joke.

  He’d been busy enough earlier in the day that he hadn’t paid much attention to it. Now he took the time to study the painting and couldn’t help but smile. The painter had caught her personality and force of will perfectly.

  Plus, the frame was Sherwood oak, the vaguely viridian-tinged hardwood that was one of his homeworld’s main exports. The portrait had almost certainly come from Sherwood itself and, unless he missed his guess, had been painted from life.

  He was tired enough that he almost missed the admittance chime on his door. Even one day was enough to sell him on Gregory’s insistence that he get a secretary.

  “Enter,” he ordered.

  Romanov had passed the close detail command to someone else and shed the heavy red exosuit battle armor in favor of the simple burgundy uniform of the Royal Guard. The woman he was escorting was in a black RMMC undress uniform and looked more than a little confused and concerned.

  “Chief Sasithorn Wattana?” Damien asked.

  Something in his tone triggered a clearly instinctive salute from the Thai woman. He returned the salute, studying her as she recognized him.

  “Yes, my lord,” she finally responded. “I’m Chief Wattana, Royal Martian Marines, Olympus Mons Defense Command.”

  “I’m Damien Montgomery,” he said gently and probably unnecessarily. “Lord Regent of Mars. You kept trying to reach General Spader, but with the inquiry ongoing, there’s a limit to how involved the General can get without getting herself—and you—in further trouble.”

  He shrugged.

  “I, on the other hand, wasn’t here when the accident happened and don’t answer to anybody except a grieving sixteen-year-old child. So, Chief Wattana, you get your audience somewhat higher up than you were expecting, but someone is listening. What were you so desperate to say?”

  She looked like she was in shock. From the pliant way she reacted when Romanov pulled a seat over to her and helped her sit, she was in shock.

  “I…” She swallowed and started again. “I wasn’t sure what was going on,” she admitted. “With the way the inquiry treated me, I was half-expecting to get marched in front of a firing squad.”

  “That won’t happen,” Damien said flatly. “There is a lot of anger and grief tied up in the inquiry over Desmond’s death, but I will not permit the abrogation of due process or your rights. Do you understand me, Chief?”

  “They seemed convinced the maintenance was negligent before even speaking to me,” Wattana told him. “I don’t feel like I’m getting much of a fair trial.”

  That was a problem and Damien grimaced.

  “I’m not involved in the inquiry, Chief,” he warned her. “I can’t be, for reasons that should be obvious.”

  “I don’t expect any special treatment, sir,” she said. “I’ve been on the investigation team for this kind of inquiry, though with less…weight, I guess. But I’ve been cut off from everything, sir. That shuttle was one of my babies, I know it inside and out, and they won’t even give me the sensor data.”

  That seemed wrong to Damien. Chief Wattana was being investigated, yes, but giving her a copy of the data to see what she could turn out made sense to him.

  “Romanov?” he glanced over to his head bodyguard.

  “Prosecutor Vemulakonda had the security clearances of everyone involved revoked,” the Guard told him. “Security precaution as our experts went over the footage and sensor data.”

  “And those experts are coming back with it being an accident, Chief,” Damien said gently.

  “Vemulakonda’s people are clearly thinking negligence,” Wattana replied. “I swear to you, sir…my lord…my…”

  “Sir works, Chief,” Damien told her.

  “Thank you, sir,” she half-whispered. “But sir…we go over those shuttles with ultrasound and every other scanner before they’re cleared to fly. I could almost rebuild it exactly the way it was twelve hours before the flight.

  “You can say accident or negligence all you want, but I know that craft. It shouldn’t have failed.”

  “There were no missiles, no weapons fire, no unusual explosions, nothing, Chief,” Damien told her. “No one shot down His Majesty’s shuttle. Everything I am hearing and seeing says it was an accident.”

  “Sir…my lord…he was my King.”

  Wattana’s sad words hung in the room for a long time as Damien looked at her. She dropped her face into her hands, and he suspected the woman was crying.

  He’d checked her file earlier. She hadn’t been picked out of a hat to run the maintenance team for the Mage-King’s own shuttle. Like she’d said, she’d done a tour as an accident investigator and had served as a shuttle tech through a number of combat engagements.

  She was probably the best shuttle tech in the Royal Martian Marine Corps.

  “He was mine, too,” Damien reminded her. “Everyone’s. He was also my friend, my mentor…and I don’t believe in accidents that kill the Mage-King of Mars and the Crown Prince in one neat little explosion.”

  “It’s possible…but we do everything to the royal shuttles,” she told him. “Most of your once-in-a-century seemingly-random failures are material failures. The deep scans we did would have caught those.

  “There is no way I can think of for the shuttle to have had that catastrophic a failure.”


  “The security on the shuttle is similarly complete,” Romanov noted. “The rest of OMDC is just as sure they let nothing through as you are. Somewhere, something failed. Isn’t an accident more likely?”

  “I don’t know,” she confessed. “But so long as I don’t have the data, I can’t know…and I know the people doing the forensic analysis of the data and the shuttle, sir, by reputation if nothing else.”

  “And?” Damien asked.

  “They’re good. I’m better,” she told him. “I don’t want to undermine the inquiry, sir, but Desmond was my King. Please. I have to do something.”

  “Romanov?” the Lord Regent asked calmly. “You were the Marine.”

  “I don’t know the analysts Prosecutor Vemulakonda has acquired,” Romanov said carefully, looking down at the seated woman. “I know of Chief Wattana, though. The Corps say she’s one of the best shuttle techs in the business and a better crash analyst.

  “You’ve crossed paths before, too. She handled shuttle turnaround during the capture of Darkport, my lord.”

  Damien snorted softly. Darkport had been a pirate station, deeply involved in the Protectorate’s never-to-be-sufficiently-damned sex-slave trade, along with less-grotesque-if-still-evil-criminal commerce. He’d visited it, back before he became a Hand.

  His visit hadn’t been directly responsible for the asteroid market being bombarded by a rival criminal syndicate and half-stormed/half-rescued by a Marine landing force…but the indirect causality chain was very clear and very short.

  “I can’t interfere with the inquiry,” he told Wattana. “Perhaps more accurately, I shouldn’t. I might have been a long damn way away, but most people would qualify ending up as Lord Regent as benefiting from Desmond’s death.”

  Most people was not a list that included Damien Montgomery. He wasn’t even sure where they got the idea that this kind of responsibility was a positive at all.

  “But.” He raised a finger. “I can do a lot of other things. Romanov—I don’t have an aide or a secretary yet, and I think we want to keep this black-on-black, so I’m going to dump it on you.”

  “Black-on-black works best with as few people as necessary, my lord,” the Guard agreed.

  “Get her a copy of that data. I’ll authorize whatever you need, but Chief Wattana gets a copy of every piece of data we have on the accident. But I want as few people to know she has it as possible, even once we’ve seen her conclusions.

  “Does that work for you, Chief?”

  “I’m not sure of the secrecy, sir, but I’ll do whatever it takes to be certain of what happened,” she told him.

  “Welcome to black investigations under the direct authority of the Mountain,” Damien told her. “They’re exactly as much fun as they sound. Find me some answers, Chief. If it’s an accident, I want both you and the inquiry to come back with that answer.

  “If it’s not an accident…” He trailed off as he realized that his own ability to run the investigation was going to be badly curtailed, then smiled thinly.

  “If it’s not an accident, well, I’m going to need to work out whether I can issue a Voice’s Warrant or if I need Kiera to sign it. Because if it wasn’t an accident, I’m going to tear Mars apart until I find the son of a bitch who killed my King.”

  14

  Damien was halfway through his third interview of the morning with a prospective secretary when Kiera barged into his office. He almost welcomed the interruption—Gregory’s staff had selected three spectacularly qualified individuals, and he had no idea how he was going to choose between them.

  “Sorry, Damien,” Kiera said, without sounding very apologetic. She glanced over at the woman he was interviewing. “Sorry, Moxi,” she added.

  “I need to talk to you,” she continued to Damien.

  “I have this thing called a calendar,” he pointed out gently. “Which you have access to and says what I’m doing for the rest of the day in thirty-minute chunks.”

  And he suspected that even those thirty-minute chunks were Gregory’s staff being nice to him for the first few weeks. He wasn’t entirely sure how Desmond had handled all of this.

  “I know, but you’re seeing Moxi and I can always lean on Moxi,” Kiera replied dismissively. “And I need you.”

  “I understand the concept of priorities, my lord,” Moxi Waller said calmly. The tall blonde had turned in her chair to study Kiera. “And I’m familiar with Her Majesty’s idea of decorum. If she needs your time, I can give way to that.”

  Damien managed to not glare at his young monarch, but it took effort. Selecting his new secretary was important, much as he was already hating the process.

  “Thanks, Moxi,” Kiera told the older woman. “It is important, I promise.”

  “I presumed,” Waller said dryly, and Damien managed not to smirk as Kiera melted under the other woman’s gaze. She clearly knew Kiera and had a pretty good sense of how much bullshit the new Queen was capable of.

  That alone was a high recommendation, he figured, and he made his decision on the spot.

  “Well, if nothing else, this little encounter has made my job a bit easier,” he told Waller. “Thank you for your patience, Ms. Waller. I’ll have Chancellor Gregory’s people reach out to all of the candidates…but I suggest you start thinking about who you’ll want for your support staff.”

  He offered his hand to the woman he’d just decided to hire.

  “We’ll see each other again shortly,” he promised as they shook. “But it is important that I remember who my monarch is.”

  Waller gave the Queen a small bow before stepping out of the room. Damien returned to his seat and regarded Kiera Alexander levelly.

  “Did you actually need to see me or were you just stress-testing my secretary candidates?” he asked.

  “Letting Moxi show off under stress crossed my mind when I saw what you were booked for,” Kiera told him. “But I did need to see you. Two things, really.”

  “Okay,” he allowed. “Which are?”

  “First, I need you to tell Dr. Gunther that I am not having kids anytime this decade,” she said flatly. “I understand why she’s worried, but the genome can survive needing Aunt Jane to produce the next generation of Alexanders.

  “Hell, it’s not like they need me to find a partner for the process—or even be alive.”

  Damien winced at Kiera’s rant. He’d only had passing encounters with Dr. Ulrike Gunther, the head geneticist responsible for making sure the Mage-King’s line remained Rune Wrights. The woman probably knew more about cloning and test tube babies than anyone else alive, but her focus was on the propagation of the Royal line and the maintenance of its power.

  Such points as “the sixteen-year-old child should not be worrying about babies” could slip her mind. And Kiera wasn’t wrong about the level of effort the Mage-Queen needed to put into the process. They could easily produce a perfect clone of her or Des—or even their father, for that matter—to be the next generation of Mage-King.

  The Royal Family just preferred not to draw attention to the level of genetic engineering going on with the Alexanders, and having Kiera pop up with a baby that explicitly had no father would be a problem.

  “I’ll talk to Dr. Gunther,” he promised. He wasn’t sure he’d get out of that conversation without being harassed to get on producing little Rune Wrights himself, but that was a less problematic demand in many ways.

  If one he wasn’t likely to concede on anytime soon.

  “We do need to keep the inheritance in mind,” he warned her. “Admiral Alexander is almost a hundred. I don’t think you’re going to get more than that decade before you’ll need to be knee-deep in toddlers.”

  Kiera snorted at the image and shook her head.

  “I like kids,” she pointed out. “I just would like to decide to have them on my own schedule, please and fucking thank you.”

  “I am your Lord Regent,” Damien said, her relieved smile showing that she picked up his emphasis.<
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  “What else did you need to see me about?”

  “I need to be in the Constitution discussions,” the Mage-Queen of Mars told her Lord Regent, her tone suddenly edging to formal and harsh. “That document will define the rest of my life and the life of every Alexander to come after me.

  “I’ll keep my mouth shut and run my comments and concerns through you if that’ll keep people happy, but I need to be in the room where it happens.”

  Damien nodded, thinking for a moment as he turned his attention to his desk.

  “Computer, load my calendar and show me the next meeting with Councilor Granger and the Constitution Committee,” he ordered aloud. The voice commands were good, if not perfect…and they were faster than trying to poke around the data with his injured hands.

  The appointment details filled the screen above his desk and he nodded.

  “Gregory and I are meeting with the Committee aboard Storm of Unrelenting Fury,” he told her. “It’s a compromise gesture, not imposing the Royal presence onto Council Station itself. Of course, Storm has been Council Station’s watchdog since the attack, so it’s only a gesture.”

  “And that we’re having the meeting on a battleship sends another message, doesn’t it?” Kiera asked.

  “Of course. I’m not sure your father did much without intention when dealing with the Council,” Damien agreed. “I’m not up to that level of game yet, but Gregory is.”

  And thank God for that. Three days in and he was already feeling overwhelmed.

  “So that’s a day each way for, what, a four-hour meeting?” Kiera asked.

  “I’m almost looking forward to the flight,” Damien admitted. “Less meetings on a shuttle, even if I suspect I will forever be in catchup mode on my messages.”

  “Give Moxi a week,” the young Queen said drily. “Her son was one of the ‘let’s please try and get the Royal Brats some regular-people friends’ students inserted into our classes when I was younger.”

  Her description made Damien want to wince again, but she probably wasn’t wrong. Moxi Waller had been a senior bureaucrat in the Mountain for thirty years, but she’d never been in the immediate circle around the Royal Family.