Mountain of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “The stealth ships can get in closer.”

  Stealth in space required a massive investment of magic and technology and even then was only so reliable. Damien had used Rhapsody in Purple to get him around Republic space safely, but the kind of scouting Alexander was talking about was one of the ship’s main purposes.

  “I’ll ask and see if we can break free more,” he told her. “My understanding is there’s only three.”

  “That’s fair. Who do I get to build me fifty more?” the Admiral demanded.

  “That would be me,” Damien told her. “We’ll see what we can do. A lot of stuff is in flux for RMN funding still, but it does look like we’ve got the next round of capital ships locked in. That’s another twelve battleships and six dreadnoughts.”

  “I’d kill for them,” Alexander said bluntly. “But I need stealth ships yesterday and they should build faster.”

  “Don’t count on that,” he warned. “But I’ll see what I can do. You’re authorized to do whatever you can with what you’ve got. If you locate the accelerator ring, that opens up a chance to end this war.”

  “It does,” she confirmed. “If I’m pissed at anything, Damien, it’s that I thought I already had ended this war.”

  “Solace was a step ahead of us. Again.” Damien shook his head. “I’m getting sick of enemies being a step ahead of me, but we’re digging for some answers of our own here.”

  “That sounds dangerous,” she said slowly, clearly picking up on some of what he wasn’t saying. Parts of this briefing would be handed over to a lot of people who didn’t need to know Damien was running a black side investigation into the Mage-King’s death.

  “That’s the job. Is there anything else critical? I have another meeting here before I head back to the surface—my secretary just about hurt me when I told her I needed four hours off-world.”

  “Your meetings move on your convenience, Damien, not theirs. That’s not just ego or power talking, either. You need to realize and rely on it,” she told him. “You’re the Lord Regent of Mars. Stuff will come up.

  “As for the war, things are quiet right now. Your apprentice is turning into quite the useful set of hands. I’m glad to have her, but I can’t promise to keep her safe.”

  “Roslyn Chambers isn’t my ‘apprentice’,” Damien countered. “I might call her a protégée, but she’s more your protégée now. But I’m glad she’s useful. We’ve put a lot of pressure on that young woman.”

  “She’s at the heart of the war now. Shit place for anyone, trust me, but her contributions will save lives. Your job is to make it all worth it.”

  “Admin, admin, negotiation, and admin,” Damien told her. “How did your brother handle this?”

  “Dad had him involved in everything from the moment he turned twenty, almost ten years before Dad’s death,” the Princess of Mars told him. “I don’t think he ever really knew anything different. Does a goldfish know there’s water in the bowl?”

  Damien snorted.

  “Probably not. We’ll keep this channel mostly open to enable reports from Legatus, but I hope to have more of these things sooner rather than later. The team responsible for letting us build them is my next meeting.”

  “Good luck. The RMN needs the Link. Mass-produced, secured, reliable—and on every ship.”

  “The Protectorate needs it in much the same state,” Damien told her. “We’ll need to consider phase-out for the RTAs and retraining and transition for the Transceiver Mages, but we need a Link everywhere.”

  “That’s your job, Lord Regent,” Alexander said with a chuckle. “Mine is running Second Fleet and poking you and Kiera to make sure I stop being Heir sometime sooner rather than later!”

  24

  The meeting with the Link mass-production team took longer than Damien had hoped but had also been more positive than he expected. In the end, he left Deimos Station half an hour later than planned.

  “Dr. Christoffsen is in the Mountain and has been advised of the delay,” Waller told him when he let her know. “He doesn’t have any other plans, he tells me, so he’s fine with waiting for dinner.”

  “I appreciate his patience and your flexibility, Moxi,” Damien replied. “Not every meeting can go as scheduled; not every task can be completed on time.”

  “I’ll make it work,” she said serenely. “I was always entertained by how much flexibility I could convince people to find when I told them who I worked for before. Now, well.” She chuckled. “It’s amazing how many things that were impossible suddenly become ‘let me check’ when I tell them I’m booking for the Lord Reg—”

  “Moxi?” Damien said into the sudden dead air. “Moxi Waller?” he demanded sharply.

  Silence.

  “Afolabi, what’s our status?” he asked, turning to check on the red-armored Guard next to him.

  “Shuttle coms are down,” the bodyguard replied. “Checking with the pilot.”

  “We just took a micrometeorite hit to the com array,” that worthy told them over the intercom. “External coms are down until we install a bunch of new antennas.”

  “That’s possible,” Damien agreed, “but damn suspicious. Pilot, bring up the defensive suite, if you please.”

  The man coughed.

  “Our defensive radar and systems have been online since thirty seconds after we cleared the station, sir,” he reported. “I’ve still got Gauntlet on the screens and we’re still under their guns. I think it’s a fluke, but I’m keeping my eyes very wide open, sir.”

  “And nothing so far?” Damien asked.

  “Nothing so far,” the man confirmed. “We hit atmosphere in twenty minutes and we’re on the ground in thirty-five. I’m scanning for potential threats, but I’ll admit I wouldn’t mind if everyone strapped in and prepared for things to get messy.”

  “When do we leave Gauntlet of Honor’s security zone?” Damien asked.

  “They’re with us the whole way. Once we’re in atmosphere, there’s a limit to what they can do, but we’re inside Olympus Mons’s defense perimeter from there. There’s a thirty-second overlap; we made sure of it this time.”

  “I wonder if someone doesn’t know that and thinks we’re vulnerable then,” he murmured. “Afolabi, get on the scanners. Is there anything close to our descent path? I know the flight path was cleared, but what’s close?”

  “Understood.” The Guard removed his gauntlets and started typing on a keyboard Damien couldn’t see. It was presumably projected on the inside of his helmet and the suit system was reading his fingers’ movement.

  “Nothing looks like it’s violating the security zone, but I’ve got a surface-to-orbit heavy shuttle that’s supposed to pass by at about ten thousand kilometers,” he noted. “Their flight path has them on the other side of the horizon, though.”

  “Show me,” Damien ordered. Something was crawling up the back of his spine, and he glanced at the velocity measure for the shuttle.

  He could teleport himself and the two Royal Guards with him to the surface safely, but there was a mass component to how much velocity he could shed in a personal teleport. He could take the shuttle…but they’d collide with the ground at several kilometers per second.

  It was an option, but not a good one. Not without a better idea of what was going on.

  “Watch that shuttle,” he ordered. “It and the next four closest vehicles to our descent. I don’t buy coincidences anymore.”

  The engine failure on the heavy-lift shuttle barely qualified as a surprise when it finally happened. The holographic projection the Guard were running showed the adjusted course as gravity started to take control of the spacecraft—and swung it right into the middle of the restricted space around Damien’s flight path.

  “Do we shoot it down?” Afolabi asked.

  “With what?” Damien asked. “They’ve calculated it well. We’re already too close in to the planet for the shuttle’s long-range weapons, and we’re not in range of her air-breathing missiles yet.r />
  “If we had coms, we could call for fire from Gauntlet, but we don’t.” He studied the chart and sighed.

  “Quite possibly, there’s someone on that shuttle right now in contact with Gauntlet. They’re saying they had an accident; they’re begging for a rescue.” He shook his head. “Quite possibly, the crew of that shuttle is innocent. It depends on the plan.”

  “You’re the Lord Regent! Gauntlet should shoot them down regardless!”

  “No,” Damien told his bodyguard. “They won’t shoot down civilians on suspicion—and they shouldn’t, either. We can handle ourselves, Guard Afolabi.”

  The two shuttles were now barely two thousand kilometers apart, well within range of any weapon designed for deep space. They were also clearly under the guns of the battleship, and anything that went wrong would see rapid intervention.

  “How long until we’re in range of the Olympus Mons defenses?” he asked calmly.

  “Seventy seconds. We’re in Gauntlet’s range for one hundred.”

  “Watch for the attack fifteen seconds before we enter the range of OMDC,” Damien ordered. “Keep the scanner data up as cleanly as you can and I’ll protect us.”

  The Royal Guard knew exactly what kind of person of mass destruction they were escorting. Any of the three red-armored Guards in the room could probably do what Damien was going to, but the Lord Regent was uninclined to go with probably.

  He watched the data, watching his ship continuing its descent. They could change course, open the range—if the pilot hammered on the emergency thrusters, they could reverse their entire descent and head for Gauntlet of Honor.

  “We’ll see how this plays out,” he murmured.

  “You do realize you are allowing them to take a shot at the Lord Regent of Mars, yes?” Afolabi asked, his voice sounding slightly strained.

  “I know,” Damien told his guard. “But this is amateur hour, Guard Afolabi, compared to some of what we’ve already seen on Mars. So, let’s remove the amateurs from the board, shall we?”

  The heavy-lift shuttle was carrying four of the Protectorate’s ten-thousand-cubic-meter shipping containers. From the thrust it had been throwing out before the engine had failed, they were full. Fully loaded like that, the “shuttle” was a fifty-thousand-ton cargo hauler that dwarfed the Model 2445-Z assault shuttle.

  And as Damien studied them, two of the cargo containers exploded, sending the shuttle spinning off course again, helplessly out of control now.

  That was for Mars Orbital Control and the ships in orbit to deal with. Damien was leaning toward the “unlucky bastards” theory for the crew of the lift shuttle at this point, but the people who’d shipped those containers…he would have words for them.

  “Drones” was all he said aloud, watching as chunks of the wreckage began to move. “Or potentially piloted ships, but they have to know their survival chances. High-altitude interceptors hidden in the containers.”

  “Whatever they are, they’re coming in fast,” the pilot barked. “And apparently, my threat warnings are still working. Missiles launched.”

  “My lord?” Afolabi said softly.

  “Hold on.”

  Damien studied the scans for a moment. There were at least thirty of the presumably robotic aircraft, and it must have taken them several seconds to shake whatever packaging had cocooned them in the cargo container.

  This part had been well designed, he reflected absently. The container explosions and the debris were covering the interceptors from above and below—and had likely left the orbital overwatch watching the damaged shuttle, too.

  Thirty-plus interceptors had sent over a hundred missiles toward the shuttle. The defensive systems had their own short-range active scanners, and they spun to life as the pilot set them loose.

  They couldn’t stop a hundred missiles, and he made sure he had the locations and velocity of the missiles locked in his mind…and then channeled power.

  Without an amplifier matrix—or at least a window—it was more a question of math than visual targeting. The missiles were there, moving at that speed, which meant that by the time Damien’s magic could act, they would be here.

  He conjured lightning, arcing blasts of electricity that appeared from nowhere and leapt from missile to missile in a catastrophic sequence of power that vaporized hulls and warheads alike.

  A third of the missiles vanished from the screen, and Damien focused on the survivors, repeating the action. Other missiles were dying to the lasers—and it looked like Gauntlet of Honor had finally realized what was going on, the battleship’s weapons stabbing from orbit to protect the frail-seeming shuttle.

  More missiles vanished as Damien sustained the lightning, arcing it back and forth across the salvo and working his way back toward the launching aircraft in a march delineated by the explosions of failing weapons.

  Gauntlet of Honor beat him to the aircraft. Barely.

  If nothing else, the battleship had more guns and more eyes. Once they were fully aware of the threat, hundreds of Rapid-Fire Laser Anti-Missile turrets began to fire. Damien only took out about half of the missiles in the end, and he watched as Gauntlet’s gunners tore through the aircraft.

  “We need one of them intact,” he said aloud.

  “We have no coms,” Afolabi reminded him.

  “Right.”

  Damien focused, reaching across several hundred kilometers of empty space to catch one of the handful of survivors—and they weren’t even trying to evade, confirming Damien’s guess of their robotic nature.

  It made this task easier as he wrapped a teleport spell, something even he usually needed to touch the target of, around the aircraft and moved it.

  He exhaled sharply as the expenditure hit him like a hammer to the gut.

  “Afolabi, once we’re down, please make sure that the Royal Guard sends a detachment to the ground a hundred and twenty-five kilometers directly north from where that drone just vanished,” he said distantly. “I doubt it survived the landing, but we need to rip it apart for evid—”

  He abruptly ran out of steam and collapsed back into his chair.

  “I’ll pass the orders on once we’re down,” the Guard confirmed. “Local airspace is secure. Are you all right, my lord?”

  “I’m fine,” Damien managed to force out past his sudden wave of exhaustion. “Teleporting something that far away is…well, jumping a starship is easier.”

  The Guard coughed.

  “I’m not sure teleporting something two hundred and eighty kilometers away is supposed to be possible, sir, but I know what I guard,” he concluded.

  If he said anything more, Damien missed it as sleep took him.

  25

  “Well, isn’t this a mess?”

  Denis Romanov nodded his agreement with Samara’s words as he surveyed the crash site. The drone had been moving at almost three thousand kilometers an hour, a speed easily handled in Mars’s thin upper atmosphere.

  It wasn’t a speed that easily handled unexpected lithobraking. The Lord Regent had teleported the aircraft to a spot well away from any habitations—which had been a damn good idea, as the drone had carved an eighteen-hundred-meter-long furrow in the ground before the wreck had finally come to a halt.

  “As messes Damien Montgomery makes go, I’m not sure this even makes the top ten,” the Royal Guard admitted as he hopped down from the helicopter. He turned to help his charge down, but Samara was already on the ground behind him.

  Two more helicopters were orbiting above the site, cameras and more esoteric sensors already at work while their cargo of Secret Service Agents and Royal Guards spread out on the ground. Another Guard and two Secret Service Agents followed Samara out of their helicopter, the Agents falling in around the Voice herself.

  “The area is secure,” Denis continued. “The drone appears to be disabled, but we’d have triggered any anti-intruder defenses it had already.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous, Guard-Lieutenant?” the Voice asked.


  “Yes. That’s why it was tested by one of the Guard,” he said grimly. “I didn’t order it, if you’re wondering, my lady. One of the Guard moved in to check without asking permission.”

  “Let’s check it out,” Samara ordered.

  “I’m not entirely clear on why you’re even here,” Denis pointed out. “I know why I’m here—I had a Guard team ready to go in case anything came up in your investigation.”

  “Someone just tried to assassinate the Lord Regent,” the Voice told him as she stepped around him and headed for the wreck. “I think that just might be related to my investigation.”

  Denis sighed. She was right.

  “Check the perimeter, watch for incoming,” he ordered his people over the com network after muting his external speakers. “The drone is the only evidence that hasn’t been vaporized. If someone is feeling anti-loose-ends, they might try something dumb.”

  He almost wished their mysterious attackers would. They’d get a lot more information from a captured attacker than from a wrecked drone.

  As they approached closer to the wreck, he lowered his estimate of what they would get from the aircraft even further. Even the main wreck was, well, wrecked. There was probably a bit over half of the fighter at the end of the furrow, but it was in multiple pieces.

  “That’s not going to be helpful,” he said. “I guess we look for serial numbers and black boxes.”

  “Exactly,” Samara told him. “If you can get the Secret Service team on that, I have a few things I want to poke at myself. Do we have an ID on the craft yet?”

  Denis surveyed the fragmented and smoking crash site.

  “Not this particular one, no,” he admitted. “Looking at this, I’m hoping the Navy got a good eyeball on them from above, because IDing this one is going to take longer than anyone would like.”

  “It’s one of ours.”

  “There is a lot of gradation in the concept of ours in this context, Agent,” Romanov replied. “What am I looking at?”