“I believe so, yes,” he confirmed. “If you take us back to the ready room, I can get a stretcher and take him to a doctor straight away.”
“He’s to be taken directly to Dr. Gunther,” Damien ordered. “I trust her to keep the Mountain’s secrets.”
He smiled thinly.
“And I’m not taking you, Corporal. Are you ready?”
Romanov and the other Guards in the room looked at him in confusion, but the medic clearly picked up his meaning. He crouched down next to his patient, double-checking the equipment he’d rigged up.
“I’m ready,” he replied.
“Good luck,” Damien told the man while running the numbers in his helmet comp. While the helmet OS wasn’t designed for this, he already had the numbers from the teleport to the estate. Reversing them and adjusting for their changed location was straightforward enough.
Power pulsed in the room, and Odysseus and the Guard were gone.
Romanov shook his head, staring at where the unconscious man had been.
“The kind of bioaugments he has aren’t legal, sir,” he noted. “I doubt I even need to tell you that. Even the research should only be taking place under the most stringent of controls and ethical guidelines, let alone packing a man full of that shit.”
“I’d guessed,” the Lord Regent confirmed. “I trust Dr. Gunther to keep him alive, but we have work to do here still. Our answers are in that man’s head, but there are answers here, too.”
He shivered against the strange cold feeling in his Sight.
“I’m going to go join the team in the basement,” he decided. “Something in this place is triggering my Sight without me being able to locate it. I think it’s downstairs and I want to find it before the hairs on the back of my neck crawl out and leave.”
Romanov snorted.
“Don’t leave the house until we find the control room,” he told his boss. “The situation is not secure until we do. I’m going to run oversight and check the perimeter. My neck hairs are objecting to wandering around an assassin’s home base with the Lord Regent of Mars.”
“Get used to it, Denis,” Damien advised. “Once he’s awake and we’ve torn this place apart, I’ll be talking to him again.”
“Are my objections to that even worth voicing?” Romanov asked.
“You can put them on the record if you’d like,” the Lord Regent replied. “They’re not changing anything.”
The door into the basement was the same “traditional ski chalet” décor as the rest of the house. Real wood paneling and real wood doors filled the house, harkening back to an older time that the owner clearly enjoyed.
The décor didn’t make it into the stairwell. The walls were bare plaster, though the lights leading down the steps were still modern and high-quality. A solid-looking security door waited at the bottom of the steps, already cut open by the Royal Guards as they came through.
One of the Guard was standing just inside the door as he came through, which was the point where Damien realized that at least one of the Guards had had eyes on him since he’d left Romanov’s side.
That was probably a good thing, though he should have noticed before then. The Royal Guard were there to protect him, and he needed to be situationally aware enough to, if nothing else, know which way to dodge.
“The basement’s a maze,” the Guard told him as he looked past her. “Whatever the internal layout was, it’s been gutted in favor of being confusing as hell under the cover of being sports supply storage.”
He saw her point. From where he stood, there were three ways he could head deeper into the basement. Each was lined with racks holding everything from surfboards to skis. There were sensible and efficient ways to organize a space like this to be useful storage.
They hadn’t been used. Instead, it looked like walls and racking had been thrown up wherever there was space whenever a new set of racks had been needed…and Damien doubted that someone with the money Odysseus seemed to have access to had been quite so random about their hobby and lifestyle.
“Any sign of the control center?” he asked.
“We’re mapping as we go. We’ll find a gap sooner or later, but it’s a mess down here. Even magic isn’t doing us much good.”
Damien inhaled and looked around, leaning into his Sight as he tried to find any clues.
“They didn’t use magic to conceal anything, at least,” he told the Guard. “We’re looking at a messy layout and technological stealth, not runes like upstairs.”
“That means we will find it,” the woman replied firmly. “Shouldn’t take more than an hour or so.”
“Send me that map,” Damien ordered. He waved in a vague southward direction. This close, he was starting to get some sense of what was bothering him. “There’s something that way that’s bothering my Sight, but I don’t want to start blasting holes until I have no choice.”
“You start blasting holes, we’ll follow suit,” the Guard told him, and he could hear the grin in her voice. “I’m not feeling charitable about this asshole’s shit. Only reason it’s intact is because it might be evidence.”
“And that, Guard Shaolin, is why I’m holding off on blasting holes,” Damien told her. His suit’s heads-up display, he’d just realized, told him the names of each of the Guards with him.
That was useful. He liked knowing the names of the people around him.
“There’s no way you can pass off keeping eyes on me while I wander this maze,” he continued as he looked around himself. “Have someone spell you on the stairs and walk with me.”
“Yes, my lord,” Guard Shaolin Lian replied. Another red-armored Guard appeared from the shadows a few moments later.
The armor could change color—Damien had an easy-access shortcut on his main screen to turn his black-and-gold royal livery red to match the Guards around him, for example—but outside of a combat environment needing camouflage, the Royal Guard would flaunt their colors.
“This way,” he told her, leaving the stairs to the new Guard. “I don’t know what is triggering my Sight…and it’s not supposed to work like that.”
It was reassuring, at least, to be up-front about why he was wandering in random directions through the basement of an assassin’s house. Even his Secret Service details had only been partially briefed on the nature of his Rune Wright abilities.
The Royal Guard knew everything.
The house was large and the basement sprawled out even farther underground than the building above them did. Even so, with four Royal Guards and Damien scouring it, it couldn’t hold its secrets for long.
The virtual map assembling in Damien’s visor told him he was looking at a “missing” space of about eight square meters. There were other potential locations for the control room—most of them bigger and more likely to hold a computing center—but this gap held whatever was setting his skin on edge.
“Any sign of a control around here?” he asked Shaolin.
“None. If I was setting this up, it would be verbal or linked to my wrist-comp,” she admitted. “A physical lever is just asking for trouble.”
“So are computerized accesses,” Damien replied. He ran his gaze along the rack of equipment in front of him. There was enough gear on this wall to field an entire lacrosse team…and lacrosse hadn’t been on any of the lists of sports Odysseus participated in.
“Whatever,” he finally said, then gestured.
The wall of equipment disappeared. If he’d done his math right, it was still intact—above them, in the middle of the empty parking pad beside the garage.
In its absence, he was looking at the back of another set of racking. He recognized the design instantly, even from this side.
The storage systems the Royal Martian Marine Corps used for weapons had a distinctive layout and structure. This was clearly two sets, designed to fold out into the space Damien was standing in at some unknown command.
“Help me,” he told Shaolin. “These look like they roll outwards
to you too, right?”
“I’ll take the left,” the Guard replied. A self-heating blade popped out of her left gauntlet and she sliced the locks holding the two panels of racking together. “Looks like the entire wall and the lacrosse display were supposed to swing open.”
Exoskeletal muscles hauled the racking open against the resistance of unmoving motors, revealing one of the two things Damien had been expecting to find down there. Five meters wide and about one and a half deep, the unfolding walls eventually created a five-by-four box walled with weapon racks.
“Lacrosse is a violent sport, I’m told,” Guard Shaolin noted. “But I don’t recall it calling for seventeen-millimeter sniper rifles.”
“Or heavy machine guns. Or lasers. Or penetrator carbines,” Damien agreed, noting each item as he mentally cataloged it. There was, at least, only one Martian Armaments Omni-munition Heavy Support Weapon in the room.
On the other hand, the OHS was a weapon capable of firing anything from seven-millimeter anti-infantry rounds—at about thirty a second—to thirty-millimeter anti-armor explosive grenades—still at about six a second.
It was an exosuit-portable, barely single-person-usable-with-a-mount weapon usually installed on armored personnel carriers.
The armory also had two penetrator carbines, notable for individually costing more than the APC the OHS should have been mounted on, with a space for the third they’d encountered upstairs.
Six lasers from four different manufacturers. Damien had only encountered one functional laser weapon in his life—they were speciality weapons for specialty uses.
Covert sniper was one of those uses.
Most of the weapons in the room were long-range quiet things. One meter-wide section of racking held twenty-six varieties of suppressed pistols, at least two of which Damien could sense as being magically concealed from scanners now he was close to them.
The feeling of wrongness came from one of the four sections dedicated to sniper rifles. There were probably more pistols than any other weapon here, but the sniper rifles came second and definitely won out by sheer mass.
Sixteen different variants of precision long-range rifle had been mounted on the wall with care, but pride of place went to an immense weapon that looked like it was designed to shoot elephants.
From ten kilometers away.
The barrel of the seventeen-millimeter rifle looked like a gateway to hell. It was the largest weapon in the entire armory after the OHS, but Damien could see where it broke down for easy transport.
Intricately carved runes covered large chunks of the weapon, wards against detection mixed with spells to stabilize the gun against wind and vibration. If power was fed to the currently uncharged runes, the weapon wouldn’t even need support. It would stay wherever it was put.
“That’s a hell of a gun,” Shaolin said softly. “I recognize most of the stuff in here, but that…that’s custom-built.”
“Probably primary used for discarding sabot rounds,” Damien replied. “Modified penetrator rounds, like…yeah, these.”
He opened the highest of the drawers attached to the lower half of the racking, exposing the ammunition he expected. The rounds in the storage honeycomb were bigger than any he’d ever seen before, but the final bullet was the same sharp-tipped tungsten round built to take down exosuits. Or tanks.
“I’m close,” he murmured. “The gun isn’t it…so…”
He touched one of the big penetrator rounds and then it finally hit him. It was in the middle. A drawer that didn’t look any different from the rest of the bullet containers around the room but was radiating something.
Damien pulled the drawer open and stared down into it, hoping for some kind of answer. The honeycombed safety storage system was mostly empty. It was sized for the massive rounds for the big rifle, but the drawer could still hold at least twenty bullets.
This one held four and they were definitely the source of his itch. Shivering against the touch, he pulled one of the rounds out and put it on top of the drawer.
The tip looked plain enough. It was a big bullet, even inside a discarding-sabot launch system. Damien tried to slice the sabot off carefully…and then recoiled as the bullet sucked up the magic and tried to pull more through the spell.
“Dear God in heaven,” he murmured.
“Lord Regent?” the Guard snapped, suddenly at his side with a weapon drawn.
“I’m fine, but we’ll need to be very careful with these,” Damien told her. “Anyone with a Rune of Power is vulnerable—and your exosuit runes are close enough.”
“The hell?” Shaolin asked.
“I can’t see the runes, but I can sense the matrix now I’m this close,” he explained. “It’s a deadly little thing, designed to force a Rune of Power into an overload feedback loop. Shoot a Hand with this, and if you’re remotely lucky, well…boom.”
The Guard took an unconscious step backward.
“I think I’ve heard of such a thing,” she said slowly. “But…who would build such a thing? And why?”
“They’re built to kill Hands, Guard Shaolin,” Damien said calmly. “And unless I’m very mistaken, this particular set was built by the Keepers. To kill me.”
His instincts had been freaking out because the last time he’d sensed this Matrix, it had been embedded in his shoulder and had nearly killed him. In a way that would have taken out the city block he was standing in.
“My questions for Mr. Odysseus just expanded significantly.”
32
“You are insane.”
Damien settled down in his seat in what had been Desmond Alexander’s office and let Malcolm Gregory get it out of his system.
“You can’t just charge into an assassin’s home to deliver a goddamn arrest warrant,” the Chancellor continued. “You’re not a Hand anymore. Not even the First bloody Hand anymore. You’re the Lord Regent of Mars. You are not replaceable and you are not expendable.”
“Replaceable is arguable, but I am most definitely expendable,” Damien finally said, gesturing for the Chancellor to sit. “Not to play the game of who is most expendable, but the alternative available was Kiera.”
The Mage-Queen had taken her seat at the beginning of the meeting and hadn’t said a word yet. Gregory took a long look at her before taking his own seat.
“And you think this is a good example to set our Mage-Queen?” he asked.
“Not even a Jump Mage can take more than one person—at best—through a personal teleport with them,” Damien told Gregory. “Our options were to blow the investigation completely open or to utilize a skill set unique to the Hands…and the Rune Wrights.
“Absent a Hand or the time to make one, the option was me or Kiera. And, my Queen”—he bowed slightly to Kiera—“you are neither trained nor ready for this kind of action.”
“I’m still not even clear on what investigation this is,” Gregory snapped. “What the hell is going on, Montgomery?”
“What’s going on is that the Lord Regent is doing his job,” Kiera said flatly. “What he was charged to do by me. On the other hand, Damien, perhaps someone should have known about this stunt before you charged into the lion’s den?”
“You didn’t even tell her?” Gregory demanded. “You. Are. Insane.”
The enunciated echo brought a smile to Damien’s face, one he needed after the previous night’s discoveries.
“Malcolm, Alexander Odysseus is our primary suspect in the murder of my King,” Damien told the Chancellor calmly. “That investigation is being kept utterly black because I have some fascinating questions on why certain people’s expertise was neglected by the Inquiry.
“But I want the facts neatly lined up before I wreck Mylene Vemulakonda’s year,” he continued. “I’m reasonably sure she made a straightforward mistake, but the possibility of something darker remains.”
“Murder?” Gregory’s performative anger was gone now. That had been frustration of a comrade at a friend who’d unnecessarily endan
gered himself. What remained was the laser-sharp cold rage of the Chancellor of Mars. “You’re certain.”
“I’m certain,” Damien confirmed. It hadn’t really been a question. “We confirmed that something went wrong on the shuttle prior to the explosion in a way that was consistent with sabotage or a bomb.
“Further investigation revealed that one-time authorization codes generated from Charlotte Ndosi’s Hand were used to access the security systems file before the shuttle launch. Despite our best efforts, we still can’t find any sign that the data was edited…but thanks to General Spader’s paranoia, we do have a copy of the original footage.”
“Even with the original, we can’t tell it was edited?” Gregory asked.
“We can tell it’s different from the original, but even putting the two next to each other, I only know which one is the original because the data source for one is uneditable by hardware design instead of software design.
“Whoever covered up the presence of our saboteur in the Mountain was very, very, very good, with intimate familiarity with the Mountain’s systems,” Damien concluded. “Not our assassin. Someone else.
“I have Odysseus. He and I are going to have a conversation in a few minutes. I want the real murderer. I have the hand that pulled the trigger, but I want the voice that ordered it.”
“Fuck me,” Gregory finally concluded after a moment’s thought. “What do you need, Damien?”
“For now, your confidence and your discretion,” Damien told the Chancellor. “This moves in the dark for a while longer. I don’t know how deep or how dirty the hole I’m digging is, and I’m worried what I’m going to find.”
“Dig as far as you can as fast as you can, my lord, but there’s duties you can’t avoid,” Gregory warned him. “You and I need to be on a ship to Council Station this evening.”
“I know,” Damien told him. “I’ll be leaving Romanov behind to keep digging here, but I want to talk to Odysseus myself.”
“Why?” Kiera demanded, the Mage-Queen inserting herself quietly into the meeting again. “The man killed my father. We strap him to a rack and pump him full of every inhibition reducer we have. I don’t need his testimony to hold up in court; we already have enough to shoot him.”
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