“The bridge is the best possible location for prisoners. I want this ship’s captain and whoever’s in charge of this mess, assuming they’re not the same person. I’m hoping at least one is on the bridge. We also need to send people to the data center. It’s the next closest.”
“Fastest way is to start cutting holes in the decks,” Romanov told him. “We’re six decks up. Go as one until we hit the simulacrum, then send half the team onward?”
“Falling is not the best plan for my leg brace, but I can work with it,” Damien replied. “Harder to ambush us if we’re not taking the route they expect, and I’m not going to weep over holes in this ship.”
He gestured for the Corporal to close up the data link.
“Ready?”
“We’ll cut the holes, my lord,” Romanov replied. “We don’t know what’s waiting for us. If there’s a Hand-equivalent Mage on this ship, Montgomery, that’s your job.”
“Fair enough,” Damien conceded. “Let’s move.”
He was still expecting the Guard to produce the long vibroblades his Marines would have used for the situation. Instead, they simply stood there, presumably allocating sections on a channel Damien didn’t share, and then unleashed their magic.
There wasn’t even a visible process of cutting. The circle of deck they were standing on just calmly sank downward, gaining speed as it did so. It didn’t even slow when it hit the deck below it and the Guards cut through again.
Or the deck below that. Or the deck below that. It was only at the deck above the simulacrum chamber itself that they hit resistance, a squad of Nemesis troopers that clearly were not expecting this.
But they were in exosuits and carrying penetrator rifles. The assemblage of deck plating hit the ground with a thud as the Guards went to shielded firing positions, locking Damien inside their circle as they returned fire at the Nemesis troopers.
“No,” Romanov snapped in his ear as Damien began to channel power. “We need you to conserve power.”
The Guard was firing as he spoke, and the sudden encounter was over as sharply as it had begun. Another of Damien’s Guards was down.
“Sandal is alive, but his leg is fucked and his suit is locked in place,” Romanov reported. “I’m leaving another Guard with him and we’re going down the last floor, my lord. Do we have a plan?”
“We can’t wreck the computers in the bridge,” Damien told him. “No penetrators. Magic first, take them alive if you can.”
“Their armor will kill them,” his bodyguard pointed out.
“Then we use our magic to get them out of their armor. I need answers, Denis, and corpses don’t give interviews!”
“Oorah,” the Royal Guard muttered. “Guards! One more floor and then we take the bridge. We need prisoners and intact systems. Magic and blades, no guns. This is why the Regent brought us. No one else could do this. Only us. Only the Royal Guard.
“Are we going to fail the Lord Regent of Mars?”
Even through the suits, Damien was pretty sure he heard the shouted answers.
“Then let’s go.”
This time, they tore open a hole in the plating and descended through it by careful levitation. The Guards landed first, forming a circular shield around Damien as he landed even more carefully amidst them.
The simulacrum chamber, the beating heart of any starship, would have been on even the most superficial of inspection tours. This corridor, unlike most of the ones they’d just cut their way through, actually looked like a luxury yacht instead of a warship.
Each wall was covered in a continuously painted mural of a woodland setting, leading up to the very non-luxury-yacht-like security hatch covering the entrance to the simulacrum chamber. That had probably been concealed during those inspection but formed a massive barrier now.
“We can—”
“No time,” Damien interrupted Romanov, gesturing his gloved and crippled hand toward the door. “Send a team on to the data center; I’ll deal with the door.”
There was a moment of silent discussion. There were only eight Guards left, which clearly meant that Romanov wasn’t going to have as many people watching Damien as he’d like. After a moment, a new hole appeared in the floor, and four of the Royal Guard dropped toward their target.
“Are we ready?” Damien asked.
“Always, my lord.”
The heavy security door vanished. If Damien had done his math right, it was only about a kilometer outside the ship’s hull…but it definitely wasn’t blocking the way anymore.
The door behind it was open and a tired voice shouted out from behind it.
“I surrender. You may as well come in, Lord Montgomery. It’s well past time you and I had another chat, isn’t it?”
Two of the Guards went first, but Damien was right behind them. He recognized the voice, which meant he wasn’t entirely surprised to find the simulacrum chamber empty other than the pale-skinned form of the man who’d been introduced to him as Winton.
“Order your people to surrender,” Damien snapped.
“I can’t,” Winton told him. “My internal coms are fucked. The jammers can only be turned off manually, and they’re not controlled from here. Last report I had was that my people were blocking your Marines. A battle, I suspect, that they cannot win.”
Winton was sitting in the chair next to the simulacrum, but he was ignoring the liquid silver model. So far as Damien could tell, the other man wasn’t a Mage at all. Despite the incongruous nature of the moment, it made near-perfect sense when the old man gestured Damien to a seat.
“I do believe this mess is over,” he admitted. “So, why don’t you have a seat, Lord Montgomery? I’m too old to run anymore. I won’t promise to answer all of your questions, but you may as well ask them.”
51
“Why did you kill Desmond Alexander?” Damien snapped. He did not take the indicated seat.
“I would have thought that was obvious the moment you put on that chain, Lord Montgomery,” Winton said dryly. “I had no faith in the strength of the Mountain under Desmond the Third. He was an old man who’d never left Mars. He had no concept of war or of what the Republic had unleashed.
“For the Protectorate to be strong, Desmond Alexander had to die. For the Protectorate to be strong, its ruler could not be an old man or a child who’d never left Mars. It needed a ruler who’d seen the worst and best of humanity, who’d walked the ruins of Andala IV and the murderous labs of the Daedalus Complex.
“The Protectorate needed a ruler who’d lived, not one who’d merely been protected,” Winton told them. “It needed you, Damien Montgomery, and I knew there was no power in the universe that would convince you to betray the Alexanders. I did what I had to do.”
“Fancy words and bullshit from a regicide,” Damien snapped.
“You don’t understand what’s coming,” the old man replied. “Even the Keepers, who had everything, did not truly grasp the warning they were meant to give. They did not understand their duty, and so the Protectorate’s sword had rusted into nothingness.
“How many ships, Lord Montgomery, would the RMN muster today if Legatus had not set their feet on the path to where we stand? Do you even know?”
“No. And I don’t need to,” Damien replied. “Nothing could justify all that you have done. The murder, the death. Even laying aside the regicide that I will by God hang you for, your hands are running in blood.”
“You know, I really didn’t want this ship in Protectorate hands,” Winton replied, ignoring Damien’s words. “My intention, once I realized how perfectly trapped I was, was to self-destruct her…and then suddenly you were aboard. I can’t kill you, Damien Montgomery. The Protectorate needs you. Humanity needs you; they just don’t know how badly yet.
“Everything I have done has been in the service of mankind. I understand the price of my cause, Damien Montgomery. Today, that price is my life.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t ready, but who ever is?”
“Not quite yet, I
don’t think,” Damien told him. “This is hardly the last conversation we’re going to have.”
“Perhaps,” Winton said. “You’re asking the wrong questions, you know.”
“And what questions should I be asking?” Damien replied. “You’re a psychopath who has left a trail of death across the Protectorate. Why would I care what you know?”
“I am not alone,” the old man said. “Nemesis is an understanding, not an organization. A realization, not a cause. I can help you realize what you have missed, Damien. Help you understand why I had to act.”
“Why, then?” Damien demanded. “You destroyed the Keepers; you killed my King, I don’t even know what else to hang on you, but evidence suggests that Samuel Finley knew you.”
Winton was silent for a moment, like he was in pain, then sighed.
“I knew Samuel Finley, yes. I can’t imagine it helps my cause to admit I helped him create the Promethean Interface, does it?”
Damien swallowed a snarl.
“What kind of monster are you?”
“The kind that accepts that someone like him was needed,” Winton told him, his voice suddenly hoarse. “You know, this was supposed to be painless. I think you’re out of time, Damien Montgomery, so I’ll ask the question you didn’t ask.
“Who built the Olympus Amplifier?” he coughed out.
Damien realized what was going on now.
“Romanov, medpack,” he snapped.
“No, you need the answer,” Winton told them. “They’re called the Reejit. Their existence is what the Keepers guarded. They created human mages for a reason and they will be coming to harvest their cro…”
He faded out into a fit of coughing in mid-word, falling sideways off the chair as it grew more violent. Romanov tried to approach him with a syringe, but the flailing old man knocked it away—and was suddenly still.
Damien looked at the body in silence.
“Guard-Lieutenant?”
“He’s gone,” Romanov confirmed. “Pulse is zero, brain activity fading. I don’t know what the poison was, but I doubt defib and an antivenin are going to cut it.”
“No,” Damien agreed. “He was buying time for something. Can we link with your team in the data center yet?”
“No, everything’s still jammed,” his bodyguard replied. “Your orders?”
“See what you can shut down from here,” Damien ordered. “Otherwise, we dig in and wait for the Marines.”
He grimaced.
“I don’t think we’re going to get many prisoners, so I hope you got his confession on recording,” he told Romanov. “Explaining this is going to be a nightmare.”
52
“What do you make of it, Munira?”
There were no words for how grateful Denis Romanov was to be back on Mars. He’d left the red planet with twenty Royal Guards, each of them a combat veteran and a powerful Combat Mage.
He’d returned with thirteen, only three of them unwounded. He wasn’t part of the unwounded list, as the cast around his right arm reminded him as he tried to look over Munira Samara’s shoulder at the data she was manipulating.
“What I make of it, Denis,” the MIS Inspector replied, “was that we put a lot of effort into retrieving some seriously screwed-up data. One set is encrypted to hell and back again and has frustrated our best efforts for four days.
“The other set appears to be just as heavily encrypted but has been partially deleted, shredded and hashed,” she concluded. “I have only the most basic of even file structures out of either set, but…”
“But?” Denis prompted.
“It’s promising,” she told him. “The bad news is that it looks like the most promising data is in the archives from Choirgirl. Unless I’m misreading this, I’d say she had a complete copy of the Keeper Archive aboard.”
“Damn. Is it intact?” Denis asked.
They’d known Nemesis had seemed to have it in for the Keepers, but they’d never been sure why. Damien had suggested that Winton was an ex-Keeper, but there was no real information there.
“I don’t know yet,” Samara replied. “I’m going to guess not. With everything Nemesis did to keep this data under wraps, I suspect it was the first target of their purge protocols. We’ll see what I can extract, but we lost a lot of data.”
“Be glad we got any,” he told her. “If Montgomery hadn’t insisted on sending a team to the data center, we wouldn’t have retrieved anything. Winton was playing for time with us, and the Marines would never have reached it in time. The one thing we did get out of Winton, though, is a keyword to search for. One that doesn’t leave this room, Samara: Reejit.”
He looked down.
“I hope that finds us something useful,” he growled. “My people died to get this data.”
“And we appreciate what your people did,” she said softly, looking up from her work to touch his uninjured arm gently. “Have the funerals been scheduled yet?”
“Next week. I can give you the schedule, if you’d like.”
“I’ll see if I can attend them,” she promised. “You look like you could use the support.”
“The Mountain trusted me with twenty of the best Mages we had, and from the sounds of it, we sacrificed a third of them for nothing.”
“Not for nothing,” she told him firmly. “The data will be valuable. It’s going to take us a lot longer to crack than we’d like. We might need to talk to Obscura. See what it wants this week.”
Denis chuckled.
“What does a complex quantum intelligence charge for its services?” he asked. Obscura was one of only four true AIs humanity had ever created. None of the four were particularly hostile to humanity…but none of the four were human, either. They were difficult to motivate out of their usual philosophical musings on the nature of the universe.
“Obscura answers about two questions a month in exchange for its power grid,” Samara told him. “MIS uses it a few times a year for pattern-seeking where we can’t find anything, but to crack this encryption, it’ll ask something extra.”
“Like what?”
“Last time I was involved? Three teddy bears and physical copies of several original twentieth-century pinup posters.” She shrugged. “I heard rumors of a case it helped crack in exchange for detailed three-dimensional scans of the investigative team nude. Obscura is…”
“A horny teenager the size of a battleship with a brain that can solve math problems we haven’t invented the language for yet?” Denis suggested. “That’s…not a point of view I’m enthused with.”
“It’s closer than the people who regard it as a digital god,” Samara told him. “Inshallah, Obscura can crack this. I think it has some interest in the continuation of the Martian power grid, if not necessarily the Protectorate or humanity.”
And at that, Denis understood Obscura to be the most cooperative of the complex quantum intelligences. There was a reason the Protectorate hadn’t built more of them.
“And if it helps, that’ll make this worth it?” he asked.
“No, it was already worth it, Denis,” Samara told him. “Choirgirl was a hostile military headquarters in our own home space. The data we already have suggests that ‘Winton’ was running covert operations across the entire Protectorate from that ship.
“We’ll learn what he was doing, who was doing it for him and why. I promise you, Denis. But even without that, you stopped him. That’s worth something.”
“I suppose,” he admitted. “Hard, though. We were hoping for more.”
“Well, there’s one thing I can give you,” she said with a sad smile as an icon popped up on her screen and she opened a message. “MISS identified him.”
“Seriously?” Denis asked.
“Take a look.”
The man on the screen was very clearly much younger, but it was also recognizably Winton. In the photo, he was about fifty, clad in a plain suit, and shaking hands…with Desmond the Third?
“Who is he?”
“Roger Bradley Clinton,” Samara told him, reading from the screen. “Retired as senior regional diplomatic attaché to four systems in the Fringe.” She shook her head. “One of them was Chrysanthemum, and he retired right before the civil war there.”
“Resigned in protest over the fact we weren’t paying any damn attention?” Denis suggested. Chrysanthemum was a Fringe UnArcana World that had revolted against an oppressive corporate owner. Mars had badly misread the situation until it was far too late to salvage their reputation with the planet, though they held the distinction of being one of exactly two UnArcana Worlds to remain in the Protectorate after the Secession.
“That’s not in the file, but it seems likely,” she admitted. “Interesting point, though: take a look at the bottom.”
DATE OF DEATH: DECEMBER 11, 2422
“He died?” Denis asked.
“Over thirty years ago,” Samara agreed, digging deeper into the data. “Five years after he retired, he was reported dead in a shuttle accident. No survivors. Legally dead, our friend Winton proceeded to cause a lot of trouble.”
“We’ll need to brief Montgomery on this, but he’s swamped,” Denis said. “Any idea how quickly we’ll have anything more to tell him?”
“No. The system is running; I need to take a break,” she admitted.
“Would you like to go grab dinner?” Denis asked before his brain caught up with his mouth.
She laughed, turning to face him fully and meeting his gaze. She studied him for a long moment as the laugh faded, then smiled softly and nodded.
“Yes, Denis, I would like that.”
53
Generals, Admirals, Chancellors, Councilors…the meetings of the Regency Council were a crowd of people who were hard to get into one room. This was only the second time that Damien had managed to get them all on a call and the first time he’d put them in the same room.
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