Mountain of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “I don’t see how, but it’s the closest match I can think of.”

  The room was silent as Damien stared at the red vector line.

  “Is there any possible other explanation?” he asked gently.

  “If one of the conduits detached without engaging the safety measures,” Wattana told him instantly. “There are seventeen layers of safety against that, my lord. You need an instantaneous catastrophic severing of the fuel line within one point two meters of the fuel tank. Any farther along the lines and even that catastrophic breach won’t have a reaction that reaches the main tank before the final safeties engage.

  “The shuttle would be a wreck, but the passengers and crew would be protected. This was very deliberately done, sir, by someone who knew these shuttles and who knew our forensic analysis procedures.”

  “And knew what they could get through the Mountain’s security,” Damien concluded. “Which raises questions of how they got whatever it was onto the shuttle. My understanding is that not only do we not have any unauthorized people in the shuttle bay after the maintenance crew went through six hours before the flight, but the security systems don’t show anyone in there.”

  “I expected as much, my lord, but take a look at this.”

  The shuttle disappeared, replaced by an image of a collection of piping and conduits. Years of study and practice didn’t fade much, and Damien could recognize them all.

  “We record everything when we do that maintenance check and review,” Wattana told them. “This is our most likely culprit. There is a thirty-six-centimeter zone between the armoring and safeties around the fuel tank and the point where the fuel-tank safeties will engage in time if the conduit safeties have a catastrophic failure.

  “It…barely even qualifies as a weak point, my lord,” she noted. “The conduit safeties themselves are five layers deep. This is antimatter.”

  “But it’s the weakest point on the shuttle where a single bomb could take out the entire craft,” Damien concluded.

  “Yes. And it lines up with our vector change,” Wattana agreed. “But this is that section when we did that maintenance check. There’s nothing out of the ordinary here. Nothing. I can give you deep ultrasound checks of the materials present, too. We took no chances with His Majesty’s ship.”

  “So, in a six-hour period when the security systems say no one entered or left the shuttle, someone did enter the shuttle and left behind some kind of charge or device that didn’t trigger the Guard security systems but was sufficient to sever those conduits,” Damien said. “It’s a stretch, Chief.”

  “I…” She inhaled and nodded. “I agree. I don’t want to question the Mountain’s security, but…my lord, that shuttle shouldn’t have blown up.”

  “And the Mountain’s security is not impenetrable,” Romanov reminded them from the door. “The Keepers undermined it repeatedly, enabled by having at least two Hands in their ranks that we know of.”

  The room was silent and Damien stared at the image of the clean and undamaged conduit that had probably killed his mentor.

  “Computer,” he said slowly. “show me all uses of one-time override codes generated from Charlotte Ndosi’s or Lawrence Octavian’s Hand.”

  The platinum icon sitting on his chest was identical to the old gold icon in one way: it contained a tiny computer that could interface with and override almost any electronic device in the Protectorate. It could also generate a list of one-use codes that could achieve the same effect without needing the Hand present.

  Hand Charlotte Ndosi had been a Keeper. She’d been the one leading the defense when Damien had raided the Keeper’s archives—and the nuke that had destroyed the archives had been a deadman switch tied to her vitals.

  Hand Lawrence Octavian had also been a Keeper, though Damien now suspected the man had been deeply involved in the attempt to destroy the Keepers. He’d died at Damien’s hands well before Ndosi had killed herself.

  And from the list that appeared in the air in front of him, both of their one-time codes had been used against the Mountain a lot. A cold sensation settled into his chest.

  “Computer, filter to uses after Charlotte Ndosi’s death,” he instructed. There were still almost two dozen. Two were the night before the Mage-King’s death.

  “If an override code was used on our security systems, that data is probably gone forever,” he finally said grimly. “But we’ll need to take a look.”

  “Do we loop in the inquiry?” Kiera asked. “It seems…right.”

  “We need to know more, I think,” Damien told her. “If you tell me to, I will, but I want to keep this black for a while longer. Bring in an investigator, someone we can trust beyond reason.”

  “Someone killed my father,” she said. “What’s more likely to find them?”

  “If they have the penetration to get this close to pulling it off without getting caught, I don’t know who we can trust,” he admitted. “A black investigation with as few people involved as possible increases our chance of catching them.”

  “You’ll need a Hand,” Romanov warned. “You can’t do it yourself, Damien. You need someone with Kiera’s Voice and the investigative chops for this job.”

  “I know someone I can trust with the skills,” Damien said slowly. “She is—was, I guess—a Voice of the Mage-King. We haven’t renewed any of those Warrants, so I guess she isn’t right now.”

  “Then we fix that,” Kiera said flatly. “You’re thinking Inspector Samara?”

  “I am,” Damien agreed. The Martian Investigation Service detective had been critical in unraveling the BLF and its attack on Council Station. Her Warrant had been to complete that investigation, but he hadn’t heard of any progress over the last two years.

  The people behind the BLF had been both thorough and homicidal in covering their tracks.

  “I’ll bring her in,” he said aloud. “Wattana, I’ll want you to put together a briefing package. Everything you’ve learned, everything you remember or have records for from the night before that flight.

  “I don’t think I can cleanly get you and Samara in the same room, so you’ll need to transfer as much as you can to her by text.”

  He smiled as a thought struck him.

  “And, Denis?”

  “My lord?”

  “How’s your second-in-command?” Damien asked.

  “Olufemi Afolabi is a solid Guard, Spader swears by him and everything he’s done has me agreeing with her. Why?” the Guard asked slowly.

  “Because I’m detaching you to Samara to provide her with muscle and the authority to access a lot of the Mountain’s systems without using the Warrant. Less attention is better until we have some proof.

  “There’s no way someone planted a bomb on Desmond’s shuttle on a whim. They were working for someone else and I want to follow the chain all the way back. I don’t want the trigger-puller. I want the brain.”

  “Agreed,” Kiera said. “I’ll want to meet with Samara, Damien. I’ve only met her once before. I trust your judgment, but…”

  “I refuse to hand out Warrants and Hands without you making the final call,” he told her bluntly. “I’ll have Waller make an appointment. I even know where I want to meet her.”

  “Damien?” Kiera asked carefully.

  “You and I need to check into the Amplifier again,” he said. “You need to be able to use it.”

  Because a Rune Wright had to sit the throne at Olympus Mons—and if Damien was chained to the throne, he couldn’t go after whoever had killed his King himself.

  21

  The intricate and stunning complexity of the Olympus Amplifier was no less overwhelming or intimidating to Damien when he wasn’t the person sitting at the center, trying to build an interface that couldn’t be codified or defined.

  He couldn’t even be certain if what Kiera was doing was right. There were parts of the runic structure she’d forged around herself that were almost directly contrary to the interface he’d built, but he could
see that they were working for her.

  The one thing that was different from the outside was the awareness of time. He hadn’t realized that building his interface had taken twenty minutes until well after he’d done it. Watching Kiera Alexander do it, he was aware of time passing and how intricate the construct she was building was.

  Once built, the construct could be set up in less than five seconds. Building it in the first place was a slow process. And that, he reflected, was with them knowing what the Olympus Amplifier was and how it worked.

  The first Desmond—and he’d been DMA-651 at the time, a nineteen-year-old number with an active question mark of how much longer the value of a powerful Mage as breeding stock would outweigh the threat of a powerful Mage prisoner—had built that construct without knowing any of that.

  The Eugenicists had calculated wrong and all of humanity had to be grateful for that. It was from this room that the Eugenicist War had been ended, with Desmond the First teleporting the Martian invasion fleet from Earth orbit to the Martian desert.

  Most historians agreed that if Desmond hadn’t activated the Amplifier and turned on his creators, the Eugenicists would have won the war. This room had changed the course of history again and again.

  A muffled chime on his wrist-comp told him that Romanov had arrived with their guest. He studied Kiera’s interface for a few seconds, then stepped away. She needed more time and she didn’t need him, not yet.

  “Bring her in,” he ordered softly.

  Inspector Munira Samara had been a senior inspector at Curiosity City when Damien’s investigation of the Keepers had gone weird. She’d ended up first attached to the roving party of experts most Hands carried with them, and then promoted to Voice in her own right after his injuries.

  She was a small woman with dark skin and brilliant blue eyes. Today those eyes gleamed in the dim light, highlighted by a very pale blue headscarf tucked into her conservative black suit.

  “Damien Montgomery,” she greeted him. “I knew we would meet again sooner or later. Inshallah.”

  “God works in mysterious ways,” he responded. “In this case, though, I needed someone I could trust. How fares your investigation into Nemesis?”

  “Poorly,” she said crisply. “The trail was lost somewhere after the ship we tracked ‘Kay’ to left Sol. That ship wasn’t seen again for over a year, and that was in a salvage auction in Amber.”

  She shook her head.

  “They’d bought it from a scavenger and hadn’t asked questions, because it was Amber,” she concluded.

  Amber was the Protectorate’s perennial problem child, a colony founded by libertarians who ran the closest thing to true anarcho-capitalism the Protectorate had. Problem child they might be, though, when Damien had sent out a call for ships to help hold back the Republic’s first attacks, Amber’s militia had answered.

  Amber’s government and people were loyal. They were just a pain in the ass.

  “I don’t think I left you many leads other than that,” Damien admitted.

  “We were chasing them as we could, but the investigation was basically cold,” Samara admitted. “His Majesty and Chancellor Gregory found it convenient to have an investigator as a Voice, but most of the cases they looped me in on were far more straightforward.”

  “I have a new one for you,” Damien told her. “If you accept it, we’ll renew your Voice and you’ll work directly for me and Her Majesty.”

  It was that exact moment that Kiera’s interface finally completed and the amplifier came alive. The silver orb exploded outward, forming the simulacrum of the entire star system as Kiera linked into the magical artifact with an audible squeak.

  “What…”

  “Welcome to the true throne room of Olympus Mons, Munira Samara,” Damien told her. “The Olympus Amplifier.”

  She looked around in awe.

  “This is incredible. What do you even need anyone else for?” she asked.

  “From here, Kiera can carry out grand miracles, but precision is hard,” he admitted. “And it’s not a tool for investigation and discovery. We have a question we need answered, and the ability to move worlds does not open doors.”

  The Amplifier could teleport ships, move space stations, even adjust entire planets. But it couldn’t zoom in far enough to affect individual people. That level of precision was impossible with a tool of this scale.

  “I am yours to command, Lord Regent, Your Majesty.”

  The simulacrum shifted slightly as Kiera rose from the chair and crossed to join them.

  “This is a black investigation, Inspector Samara,” the young Queen told the woman. “Even the existence of your Warrant will be classified, restricted to as few people as we can manage. You’ll work with Guard-Lieutenant Romanov and through Lord Regent Montgomery’s staff as much as possible.”

  “That’s…non-optimal, but I can probably make it work,” Samara agreed. “But…I should probably ask what I’m investigating, if we’re going that black.”

  “Someone murdered Desmond Michael Alexander the Third and Desmond the Fourth,” Damien said flatly. “And seventeen other people on that shuttle. We have grounds to believe that the Mountain’s security systems were compromised, potentially with a one-time security code generated from Charlotte Ndosi or Lawrence Octavian’s Hands.”

  Damien had never met Hand Octavian…but he had killed the other Hand, destroying the man and his Keeper-designed warship in self-defense. Like Ndosi, Octavian had been a member of the Keepers—and unlike Ndosi, Damien believed he’d been a member of whatever cancerous organization had metastasized out of the Keepers and manipulated Damien into destroying them.

  Munira Samara was silent for at least ten seconds. Twenty.

  “You’re certain,” she finally said. “Why isn’t the inquiry acting on this?”

  “That, Inspector Samara, is why this investigation will be black,” Damien told her, finally admitting aloud what he’d been trying not to accept all along. “The investigation has focused on negligence or accident from the beginning. While we believe a lot of effort went into making the murders hard to detect, the inquiry’s focus worries me.

  “I’m not certain I trust Vemulakonda. I’m not sure I trust Olympus Mons Defense Command. I do know I trust you.”

  “That’s quite the vote of confidence, my lord,” Samara replied. She looked up at the silver model of the solar system above their head and shivered.

  “Why would anyone kill the Mage-King?” she asked.

  “I can think of several hundred reasons,” Damien admitted. “I need you to find out which one. And who did it. Someone got into the Mountain’s security systems, which should barely be possible with a Hand’s codes.

  “They appear to have used a Hand’s codes, since we know we had at least two renegade Hands in play, but the security system should still have stopped them wiping the data. But we know roughly how the shuttle was destroyed, and it couldn’t have been done without physically installing something in the shuttle.”

  “So, we need to identify an intruder that isn’t on the security systems, trace them back and find out who hired or recruited them,” Samara summarized. “What kind of backup am I going to have here beyond Romanov?”

  “A team of the Royal Guard will be on standby,” Damien promised. “If you need a door kicked down, we’ve got some damn big boots on hand.”

  “That’s not really the Guards’ role, Damien,” Kiera pointed out.

  “I know. That’s why no one will be expecting it,” he told her. “Let’s consider it proactive bodyguarding.”

  He met Samara’s gaze.

  “I’m not sure who to trust, Munira,” he repeated. “But I won’t force you to take this on. If I’m right, we’re sending you after some extremely dangerous, extremely capable people.”

  “Just like Nemesis,” she pointed out.

  “I suspect it might well be Nemesis,” he told her. “And I wonder if that’s one man or something bigger.”

/>   “I’ll just have to find out, won’t I?” she asked. “I’m in, my lord, Your Majesty. I’ll need everything you’ve got and a secure office here in the Mountain. I’ve been working out of Olympus City’s MIS offices, but it sounds like we need this locked down.”

  “I’ll talk to my staff and get it sorted,” Damien agreed.

  Kiera was already taking the archaic parchment of the Warrant out of her suit jacket and holding it out to the investigator.

  “These people, whoever they are, killed my father and my brother,” she told Samara. “I want them, Voice Samara. I want them nailed to a wall with enough evidence that there is no question before anyone that they are guilty as sin.

  “I want to know who killed my family and I want to know why. I’ll settle for revenge, Samara, but I want justice and I want to know they won’t hurt anyone else. Understood?”

  Samara dropped to one knee and held out her hand for the parchment.

  “I understand completely, my Queen,” she told Kiera. “I can’t guarantee fast results, but if we can follow this trail, we will. To the end.”

  “Then We name you Our Voice in this matter, Munira Samara,” Kiera said formally. “We grant you Our Warrant and send you forth in Our name. Know you speak for Us. Do not abuse this privilege. Do not fail in your charge.”

  “You have my word. Bi-smi llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm.”

  In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

  That was a promise Damien could accept in any language.

  22

  The first week had passed in a blur before Damien even managed to find time to “borrow” the Mars RTA for a personal discussion.

  Sol was one of only two systems with multiple Runic Transceiver Arrays. Even one was an immense undertaking to build, and adding a second required incredibly careful balancing of energy and magic.

  Even for the Rune Wright Mage-Kings, Damien suspected that building a third had been a nightmare. He wasn’t even entirely sure how Tau Ceti had built their second one—but he did know it had taken twelve years.