Mountain of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “And it didn’t occur to you at that point that just handing over details of the assassination plot might have been enough?” Kiera demanded. “Instead, you killed my father and brother.”

  The office was silent.

  “I was afraid,” Granger said, his voice very quiet. “I had every evidence that my office was compromised, that Nemesis’s reach was long. It seemed very likely that any attempt to warn His Majesty would be blocked and result in my own death.”

  “You were literally in a room with the Mage-King of Mars arguing to set him up for this,” Damien noted. “There would have been no better time.”

  “I…I was not prepared to sacrifice my life for his,” the Councilor admitted in a hoarse whisper. “And I knew that all the resources of Mars could not save me. They won’t save me now, either.”

  “Have a little faith, Councilor,” Damien told him. “You didn’t have enough data to track Nemesis originally. Do you now?”

  “Not enough for my resources,” Granger confessed. “But…”

  Carefully, straining against the bonds around him, he typed in a sequence of commands on his wrist-comp and withdrew a datachip.

  “This is everything I have,” he told them. “I couldn’t safely store it anywhere else without fear it would be lost. I couldn’t trust anyone. I don’t think you realize how much two years of that could wear on a man.”

  “And I think you give yourself too much credit for your weakness,” Kiera told him. “Your failures killed my family, Suresh Granger. Montgomery’s mercy stands, but you will be taken from here to a cell until we know if your information helps at all.

  “You have bought your life. We will see whether you have bought something as merciful as exile before We decide to grant it to you.”

  Everyone in the room picked up the Royal We. It wasn’t often used in Martian tradition—it was, in fact, only used for extremely formal statements—such as when passing final judgment.

  “I understand, my Queen,” Granger told her. “If it eases your anger, realize that Nemesis will destroy me for this.”

  “You destroyed yourself a long time ago, Granger,” Damien countered. “But if they kill you, it will be through no lapse of ours. Imprisonment comes hand-in-hand with protection, after all.”

  He nodded to Romanov.

  “Have the Guard take him away,” he ordered. “Let’s see how long we can keep this secret. We only have so much time.”

  Samara had already grabbed the datachip and was looking at it greedily.

  “Give me a day,” she told them. “I’ll find the bastards.”

  41

  Duke of Magnificence hadn’t left Martian orbit yet. She’d been undergoing resupply and minor maintenance, important-enough tasks that Damien hadn’t interrupted them for such minor tasks as hauling him to meetings.

  Now…

  “Mage-Captain Denuiad, it is a pleasure to speak with you again,” he greeted the woman who appeared in the hologram in front of you.

  “Duke and her crew are at your disposal, Lord Regent,” she replied. “I’m doubting this is a social call.”

  “Officially, it is,” he said with a grin that he knew told her the truth. “I would like to join you and your senior officers for dinner this evening, in memory of old times. I’ll need to bring some extra guests, of course.”

  The Royal Martian Navy ran on Olympus Mons Standard Time, the same time zone as the Mountain itself. Dinner, by a standard schedule, would be in under two hours.

  “Should I arrange for that invitation to have been sent a day or so ago?” Denuiad asked. “We would be delighted to host you for old times’ sake, Lord Montgomery. Is there anything in particular I should prepare?”

  “It will be just like old times,” Damien told her. “Just like. Prepare for that, if you would be so kind?”

  Old times had been everything from covert operations to invasions to food relief to civil war. If Duke of Magnificence prepared for old times, she’d be ready to go to war.

  “I can do that, my lord,” she confirmed brightly. “We will be shipping back out for Legatus in two days, so we are well stocked for dinner.”

  Or war. That could come in handy.

  “Thank you, Mage-Captain. My companions and I will be aboard before the regular dinner time. I look forward to discussing old times.”

  She chuckled.

  “I’ll advise my XO and my…stewards,” she told him. “I look forward to seeing you again.”

  Her image vanished and Damien looked over his console. He had several more calls to make…and since he wasn’t making them from his office, his ability to see them was promptly interrupted by Persephone’s arrival on top of the touchscreen.

  “No, stop,” he told the cat. Somehow, she managed to dance across the active surface without actually triggering anything before leaping onto his shoulder as he reached for her.

  She answered his aggravated sigh with a determined purr that told him he’d been working too much.

  “Get used to it, cat,” he warned her. “I’m glad you have Schenck. I don’t think this is ever going to slow down.”

  He took a moment to lean into the purring kitten, letting her vibrations ease the pain in his temples. Then he gently lowered her to the ground with magic and brought his next call up.

  If he was going to be on a shuttle in an hour, he had a lot of work to do.

  Damien Montgomery was utterly unsurprised to find Kiera at the door to his quarters as he was heading to the shuttle.

  “I take it the lectures on personally leading assaults didn’t take?” she asked.

  “They did not,” he agreed.

  “So, are you going to be a hypocrite?” Kiera continued.

  “By which you mean, am I going to refuse to let you come along?” Damien said. “Yes. Violation of the two-shuttle rule and we have less excuse to take you up to Duke of Magnificence in general.”

  “I could teleport up there,” she noted. “No one would be the wiser.”

  “And I’d still be taking the Mage-Queen of Mars into a probable combat zone,” he countered. “It’s not happening, Kiera. You’re not trained for it and you’re not ready for it.”

  “These people killed my family,” Kiera told him. “I am a Rune Wright, an Alexander. I can take them.”

  Damien sighed, glancing around. They were still deep inside the family section of the Mountain, with Royal Guard details sweeping in front of them and following behind. No one was going to overhear this conversation.

  “Potentially,” he agreed. “But you don’t need to and we can’t risk you.”

  “And we can risk you?” she snapped.

  “Yes,” he confirmed. “If I die, it’s a pain in your ass but Gregory can act as Lord Regent. You can use the Olympus Amplifier and are the rightful heir. I am expendable in ways that you are not.”

  That brought a thought, but Kiera was doubling down even as he was plotting.

  “Not really,” the Mage-Queen of Mars told him. “You might be expendable to you, but you are not expendable to me. I…” She swallowed. “I can’t face this alone. These next few years? I need you. The Protectorate can use you, but I need you.”

  “I don’t plan on dying, Kiera,” he said softly. “My job is to keep you safe for the next three years, Kiera Alexander. Part of that is making sure the people who killed your father pay for their crimes.

  “And part of it is being overprotective and keeping you on Mars while I do things that are necessary but stupid,” he told her. “But, now that I’m thinking about it, I actually need you here for other reasons.”

  “Really,” she said dryly. “And what can I do that no one else can?”

  “You can use the Olympus Amplifier,” he echoed from a few moments before. “And with the Olympus Amplifier, you can do things no one else can. Surprise is key to our operation here, Kiera. If we lose it, we will lose Winton. He will escape. My current suspicion put either him or Kay at the top of Nemesis and directly responsibl
e for your father’s death.”

  “And how exactly does my staying here change that?” she demanded.

  “If I lock you inside a safety vault behind a hundred Royal Guards, it doesn’t,” Damien replied. “But if you go down to the amplifier and we work together…”

  “All right, Samara, what are we looking at?”

  The Voice was sitting across from Damien on the updated shuttle.

  “First, has someone checked the antimatter lines on this shuttle?” she asked, glancing around nervously. “I didn’t use to mind flying in these, but…”

  “We checked,” Romanov confirmed as the Royal Guard took a seat. Unlike most of the last week, he was back in his red exosuit armor. None of the Guard had their helmets up, but all of them were in the armor, at least.

  “Oh, good.”

  The noises around them quieted as the shuttle slid into launch position.

  “Which brings me back to my question,” Damien noted. “We sent this into motion when you told me you had a target. No one—including Captain Denuiad’s staff—thinks we’re actually having dinner on Duke of Magnificence. So, where are we going?”

  Her immediate response was cut off as the engines flared. The shuttle had been refitted to have the amenities expected for the Royal Family, but even with magic, there was only so much muffling that could be done for the engines at full power.

  The thrust held them against their seats for a full minute before it cut to a quieter burn, directing them toward their battlecruiser destination.

  “In answer to your question, my lord, we’re going here,” Samara told him, projecting a hologram in the middle of the shuttle. It was a map of the Sol System with a single flashing red dot in the asteroid belt.

  “Nemesis was bouncing their messages through several automated beacons, but those were general beacons, not theirs,” she noted. “Granger had traced the transmissions through those to a second set of beacons and hadn’t been able to track it past there.

  “Unlike Granger, I have full access to the military sensor networks and their archived records,” Samara continued. “Combined with the location and date stamps Granger had collected, I IDed four covert beacons used over a period of two years. Each beacon was only used once and then, so far as I can tell, self-destructed.

  “Neat and clean. But not untrackable, given the information we had. Considering orbital mechanics, the transmissions from all four intersected on this orbit in the asteroid belt, currently at its most distant from Mars.”

  “And?” Romanov asked.

  The map zoomed in, revealing a crude-looking space station, half-built into the side of an asteroid.

  “United Nations Relay Station VRF-Seven-Six-Five,” she reeled off. “Built during the war, abandoned shortly afterwards. Claimed, refitted and re-abandoned at least twice after that. On a list of potential assets retrieved from the Belt Liberation Front when we broke what was left of them.

  “Long-distance scans at the time showed the station as inactive, and we had the entirety of the BLF’s known membership in custody, so it wasn’t further investigated,” she admitted. “Current scans also show it to be inactive, however, which means someone had done a very good job of concealing their presence.”

  “Is it potentially automated?” Damien asked.

  “Potentially,” she confirmed. “It was built for a crew of eleven under the UN. Records of the refits show that it could now hold as many as thirty people in reasonable comfort for an extended period.

  “That’s assuming the BLF or Nemesis haven’t made further upgrades. The asteroid it’s attached to could easily be hollowed out further to triple that capacity.”

  “We can handle that,” Romanov said calmly. “There are twenty Royal Guards on this shuttle, and Duke of Magnificence has several hundred more Marines we can borrow if needed. A hundred Nemesis troopers don’t worry me.”

  “The problem is that we need key components of the facility intact and we don’t know if Nemesis’s personnel are sufficiently fanatical as to self-destruct the facility with themselves in it,” Samara said bluntly. “We know nothing about their personnel or equipment resources.”

  “It’s entirely possible we’re facing a full platoon or more of people just as capable and just as well equipped as the Royal Guard,” Damien concluded. “Be prepared for anything, Romanov.”

  “We will be,” he said grimly. “And we will have Duke for backup. The concern is the data, you said?”

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “We can get a lot of information from the BIOS on the transmitters themselves, but I doubt they actually operate from the station. It’s a relay, and if we capture the computers intact, we can trace them all the way home.”

  “Do we know where the computers are?” Damien asked.

  “Not with certainty,” she admitted. “I know where they were and the most likely installation zones—but at close range, Duke’s sensors will be able to resolve them with relative ease.”

  “Getting in that close won’t be easy, not if they have weapons or if we’re at risk of them destroying the entire station,” Romanov noted.

  “That’s already handled,” Damien replied. “If we can locate the computer cores, then you and I can teleport straight there with the Guard. We lock down the data we need and play anvil—the Marines hit the surface and play hammer.

  “Straightforward enough if you can teleport troops in.”

  “If anyone is expecting that, it’s Nemesis,” Samara warned. “They had to know that if anyone ever came after them, there would be Hands in the lead.”

  “I know. And that, my friends, is why I don’t plan on giving them any warning that we’re coming,” Damien told them.

  42

  As Damien and Romanov made their way back through the shuttle, they found Damien’s armor waiting for them. The black-and-gold exosuit still looked undersized compared to the red armor of the Guard, but that was unavoidable.

  Damien had worn full-sized exosuit armor a few times. The standard-size suits adjusted for a thirty-centimeter range of human heights, but that range started at one hundred and sixty centimeters.

  Both smaller and larger suits could be made, but they were rare. The Marines tended to assign people too small for exosuit armor to shuttles and combat vehicles—and bigger Marines were usually assigned to special-purpose heavy-weapons suits.

  “Armor up,” Romanov told his boss. “I don’t expect that you’re going to stay aboard Duke, are you?”

  “For this to be worth anything, we need to seize the data core,” Damien replied. “That means I need to take you all there—and while I can send one or two of you away from me, if I’m teleporting a platoon, I have to come with you.”

  “I figured,” the Royal Guard replied. “So, armor up.”

  Damien nodded to his bodyguard and accepted help from an already-armored Guard to get him into the suit. It closed over him and he waved the helmet over to him. He tucked it into an armored elbow to spare his hands, then glanced over at Romanov.

  The Guard-Lieutenant was already fully armored up, his helmet locked on and a penetrator rifle in his hands. He was studying a black box that looked out of place in the weapons racks in the back of the shuttle.

  “Are those what I think they are?” Damien asked softly. If they were, the box was lead-lined or he’d have known they were aboard the moment he’d entered the shuttle.

  “Twelve Rune Breakers. Not even half a full magazine,” Romanov confirmed. “Not sure if they’re worth bringing. I’m hoping we’ve run out of Hands that have betrayed the Mountain.”

  “I’m pretty sure we have,” Damien agreed. “Bring them anyway. Fire one of those into a ship’s amplifier matrix anywhere near the core and, well, you’d better hope I’m nearby to teleport you out.”

  “Great. Because what I need is more ways to kill myself when I’m on a hostile warship,” the Guard snapped. But he stowed the lead-lined box in one of his exosuit’s compartments.

  “We are touch
ed down and the bay is cool,” the pilot announced over the shuttle’s intercom. “Well, cool enough to be survivable. I’m not gonna tell you you’d like it out there without armor, but you’d live.”

  One of the major reasons for exosuits, beyond the value of mechanical muscles increasing armor and weapon capacity, was that an exosuited warrior could cross the superheated field where a shuttle had just landed without waiting for it to cool.

  Even shuttle bays could only dissipate that heat so quickly, which made for an inevitable wait after a shuttle had landed anywhere.

  “Let’s go,” Damien ordered. “Mage-Captain Denuiad will be waiting for us.”

  Damien wasn’t wrong. If there’d been any suspicion that Mage-Captain Denuiad had missed what he’d meant by “just like old times,” it was thoroughly allayed by the presence of her Marine CO in full exosuit armor. Mage-Captain—diplomatically promoted to simply “Major” aboard ship, a rank the Royal Martian Marine Corps didn’t have— Ubirajara Tupi was one of the Marines who wore oversized standard combat armor, towering over his already-tall ship CO.

  The special-weapons suit he wore was designed to carry magazine-fed missile launchers, heavy portable lasers, and similar antiarmor or antiaircraft weapons. Currently, the mounts were empty and Tupi held his helmet in his hands.

  “Lord Regent, welcome back aboard Duke of Magnificence,” Denuiad greeted them. “Guard-Lieutenant Romanov, welcome as well. Will anyone else be joining us for dinner?”

  “I’m afraid we’re going to have to cancel dinner,” Damien told her as Royal Guards continued to troop out of the shuttle behind him. “I need to commandeer your ship for the good of the Protectorate. Is Duke of Magnificence ready for combat, Mage-Captain?”

  “We are fully fueled, fully supplied, and fully crewed, Lord Regent,” she replied instantly. “Our magazines are loaded with Phoenix IXs as well. We’re expected to escort a munitions convoy with the new missiles to rendezvous with Second Fleet in thirty-six hours.”