“Augments.”
#
The presence of the Legatan Mage killer cyborgs crystallized the fear that had been rising inside Damien since they’d arrived. They were late and Eleanor Meir was in grave danger. There was no time to check if traps were disabled or fight their way through whatever Augments were left.
They had to get into the armored core of the safehouse now.
“Stand back,” he snapped at Romanov, then gestured at the wall once the Marines were clear. Exploding the wall would risk both his people and the woman they were trying to save. Most of his other options were power-intensive and messy, still dangerous for those around him, except…
He teleported a ten-square-meter chunk of wall into orbit and strode forward into the gap he had opened, fire flashing from his hands at the stunned trio of Augments guarding the corridor on the other side.
One went down to his attack, the others crumpled as gunfire followed from Damien’s companions. Then the other side of the corridor followed the first wall into space, and the Hand charged forward into the frozen tableau of shocked people on the other side.
Eleanor Meir was back against a wall, her eyes flickering to him with sudden, unexpected hope.
Three Augments were closer to Damien, turning to the sound of the guns as they realized something was happening.
A fifth individual had pushed Meir against the wall but turned as Damien barged through. A smile flickered across the man’s lips as he met Damien’s gaze, and the two of them recognized each other.
It was the same Mage who’d betrayed Charlotte Ndosi and shot her in the back in the Archive, attempting to kill two Hands with one bullet.
That Mage moved first. Fire flickered into existence around his hands and he slammed a fist through Eleanor Meir’s chest, crushing the woman’s ribcage and smashing her body back into the bookshelves with brutal force.
The closest Augment slammed into Damien as he tried to attack, the cyborg moving with inhuman speed and long training to counter the Mage before he could act. An iron-hard fist slammed into his shoulder, shattering his cast and sending him gasping backward as the cyborgs closed with him.
“I’d love to stay and play,” the Mage told Damien, letting Meir’s corpse slide off his hand. “But I have other business to attend to. Major, I leave the Hand to you. Mage-killing’s your job, isn’t it?”
Pinned to a wall by an Augment and disabled by pain, Damien didn’t manage anything before Meir’s murderer flipped him a familiar mocking salute and disappeared in the pop of a teleport.
With one Augment holding him, another opened fire on Damien. He managed to yank his wounded shoulder out from under the ironclad grip holding him to the wall, turning a lethal headshot into a painful series of impacts across his armored suit.
Free now, he unleashed a gout of plasma from his hands, hammering it into the Augment standing over him and hurling the cyborg back, smashing furniture to pieces as he incinerated the flesh around the metal.
Even Legatus’s cyborgs couldn’t survive that—and Romanov’s people were only seconds behind him. The last two Augments went down under heavy fire, and Damien struggled to his feet to cross to Meir.
Her eyes were still open, still staring blankly in his direction as if imploring him to act a little bit faster, arrive a little bit sooner.
“Damn it,” he swore. Gently, he closed her eyes and stood up to look around.
This safehouse hadn’t been a backup archive. There were a few books on the shelves, but none of the papers or storage media it would have taken to contain the Keepers’ library. If Meir had known the location of a backup of the data, it was lost with her.
“Wait,” he heard Romanov say, the Marine checking over the Augments. “This one’s alive—losing blood fast, but…”
“Stabilize him,” Damien snapped. “Somebody is going to give me some damn answers today.”
#
Chapter 25
“I failed, my liege,” Damien said quietly, staring out the windows of the Mage-King’s private office. This sanctuary was buried at the top of Olympus Mons, where the air outside wasn’t even breathable by humankind.
Even so, he knew that Royal Guards in exosuit armor patrolled the bleak slopes outside that pane of heavy bulletproof glass, and antimissile lasers and anti-air missiles were hidden just out of sight.
“So far as I can tell,” he continued, “Eleanor Meir was the last Keeper. No one else who was pegged as even a possible candidate is alive. I may have gutted their core membership, but someone else cleaned house.
“I failed to save them,” he repeated.
“I’ll shed no tears for my grandfather’s fanatics,” Desmond Michael Alexander pointed out from behind his immense, heavy desk. “I can regret that their secrets are lost and I can regret that we end with no answers, but I will shed no tears for the men and women who turned my Hands against me and chose the murder of civilians to guard their secrets.”
Damien winced, finally turning to face his King again.
This was an office none but the Mage-King’s closest confidantes saw. Hidden safely away from the planet below and paneled with wood brought from Earth, it had originally been the office of the High Matriarch of the Eugenicists, from which that woman had led the plans and schemes that had conquered Mars, triggered a century-long war and created Mage-kind.
And killed somewhere between five and ten million people along the way. They had a rough idea how many tens of thousands of children had died in Project Olympus, the crash force-breeding program that had created the Mages and rediscovered the Gift. The numbers who had died in the War and in the purges of Mars’s civilian population…were even vaguer.
But it was a comfortable, quiet office with full modern electronics, tucked away from the hustle and bustle of the Mountain. Here was where the Mage-King of Mars worked in private.
“I promised Meir I would protect her,” Damien told Alexander.
“And you wouldn’t be the man you are, who I value at my right hand, if you didn’t regret failing to keep that promise,” his King agreed. “I’d have rather we saved her myself—it appeared she was innocent of most of the Keepers’ crimes—but do not forget those crimes occurred. They made themselves our enemy, Damien.”
The tone of command was unmistakable, and Damien bowed his head in acquiescence.
“I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying desperately to find one of them…any of them alive so that we could get our answers,” he admitted. “I forgot the larger picture.”
“It happens, but we need to be careful of it,” Alexander warned. “Our job is to see the picture most people are too mired in the day-to-day to catch. Getting lost in the details is a risk we need to watch for.”
Damien nodded slowly, turning back to look out over the mountain again. In the far distance, down the rocky slope, he could make out the glow of Olympus City in the setting sun.
“Twenty Augments,” he said. “Fully implanted, fully functional, combat-grade cyborgs on Mars.”
“Are we sure they’re Legatan?” Alexander asked carefully.
“Not one hundred percent, not yet,” Damien admitted. “They’re being autopsied as we speak and the hardware examined. We will know with certainty by morning.”
“Good. If they are…” he trailed off.
“We also have a prisoner,” Damien pointed out. “Dr. Nguyen has him in emergency surgery, but I understand that he should pull through.”
“I want you to handle the interrogation personally,” Alexander told him. “What we can get out of that man could change everything.”
“Just the confirmed presence of a secret cell of Legatan Augments on Mars, caught in an act of terrorism, changes everything,” Damien replied.
“Agreed. Prepare your charges, Damien. One way or another, you’re going to get your Inquest.”
#
It was almost midnight by the time Dr. Vinh Nguyen finished his work and stepped out of the operating room, a nur
se stripping his gloves off into a disposal bag as the door closed behind him. He glanced around him at the hulking forms of their prisoner’s guards in exosuit armor and made a displeased grunt.
Two Royal Guardsman and two Marine Combat Mages, all in full armor, stood sentinel outside the OR. There would no chances taken with a Legatan Augment. The Protectorate’s information on the cybernetics those men and women had installed was sparse, but Damien knew their reputation.
The Augments were Mage-killers. That was what they had been created to do. Trained to do. In many cases, they’d been raised to do it from an early age.
“How is our friend?” Damien asked.
“He’s going to survive,” Nguyen replied. “At least for now,” he added, looking at the armored guardians. “Is this really necessary, my lord?”
“That man is a combat-grade cyborg we caught in the middle of an act of terrorism,” the Hand replied. “He’s in no danger of execution, but the precautions are very necessary.”
Nguyen snorted.
“Not as much as you think, my lord,” he told Damien. “I don’t have the codes or enough knowledge of his hardware to do any partial shutdowns of his implants, Montgomery. I had to shut down the whole suite, and his body is dependent on them.”
“How bad?” Damien asked, wincing at the thought.
“He’ll be blind and partially paralyzed until I either get enough software codes or comfort with the hardware to bring at least his eyes and basic limb supports back online,” Nguyen said flatly. “He’s going to be unconscious for at least six more hours, during which I plan on going over the autopsy results from his friends.
“Continued sensory deprivation of a prisoner is illegal, my lord Hand, and for good reason.”
“I know. And I want him alive and sane,” Damien agreed. “I need to speak to him as soon as possible.”
“That’ll be in the morning,” the doctor told him. “The remaining spells to heal his injuries will take six hours to work, and I’ll need to check him over again before I’m prepared to sign off on even questions, let alone interrogation.”
“Our time is limited. There was a Mage with them who escaped.”
Nguyen held up a hand.
“I’m not being obstructionist here, my lord,” he pointed out. “He may be a criminal—a murderer—but he remains my patient and you want him alive to question.
“So, give me my time,” he insisted. “He’ll be better able to answers your questions then.”
“All right, Doctor,” Damien allowed. “But the situation may change,” he warned. “This remains…fluid. We may need to ask him questions sooner rather than later.”
“I will inform you as soon as he is ready.”
#
Damien’s dreams continually replayed Eleanor Meir’s death, intermingled with Charlotte Ndosi’s death. Neither woman had had the opportunity to forgive or condemn him for their deaths in real life, but that didn’t stop their dream avatars informing him it was his fault.
Over and over and over again.
It was a relief when an alarm finally jerked him awake. The buzzer rang several times before he managed to pull himself out of bed and accept an audio-only channel.
“Montgomery.”
“Our Augment friend is awake,” Nguyen told him. “I’ve checked him over; he’s in about as good health as you can expect from someone who was shot four times and has had a pervasive set of cybernetics disabled.”
“Is he talking?” Damien asked.
“Not really,” the doctor admitted. “I don’t think he’s as groggy as he’s pretending to be, though. Assessing the situation. Clever bastard.”
“It will take me at least half an hour to get down there,” Damien told him. The Mountain was huge, and he needed to shower the fear sweat off.
“That’s fine; I want to poke at a few of these systems with a live subject, make sure he’s actually as intact as I think he is.”
“Be careful, Doctor.”
“At least one of your armored mountains has been in there with him since he woke up,” Nguyen replied. “I am aware of the threat, my lord, I’ll be careful.”
“Good,” Damien told him, then paused before turning off the channel. “Did the autopsies on the other Augments get finished?”
“Yes,” the doctor said crisply. “Legatan. No question about it. It’s black parts, no serial numbers, no identifiers, but it’s all Legatan hardware, Legatan surgery practices…the samples we’ve taken agree.
“Your mystery men were Legatan Augment Commandos,” Nguyen confirmed flatly.
Damien sighed.
“Thank you, Doctor,” he told Nguyen. “It’s what I expected. It’s even what I needed. But damned if I didn’t hope it might be something else.”
Not that something else would have changed anything, he supposed. They knew what was going on; all he needed was enough proof to justify an inquest to tear apart a planetary government.
Those corpses in Nguyen’s morgue were that proof.
#
Showered, dressed in a clean suit, and with Romanov, Samara and two Secret Service bodyguards in tow, Damien arrived at Nguyen’s hospital exactly on the half-hour mark he’d given the doctor.
Security had tightened even further since the previous night, with a squad of exosuited Marines blocking the entrance into the hospital complex from the main traffic corridors. They took a moment to scan Damien and his people’s ID to be safe, even though they clearly knew who Damien was.
“We appreciate your patience, my lord,” the Sergeant told Damien once they were done. “Orders from on high said to be extremely careful.”
“Those orders were mine, Sergeant, or near enough as makes no difference,” he replied with a grin. “Carry on.”
With a nod, the Marine stepped back and waved Damien and his party through. Dr. Nguyen and a pair of nurses were waiting on the other side, the nurses looking intimidated by the sudden appearance of armored Marines everywhere.
“My lord,” Nguyen greeted him. “We moved the prisoner to a secure ward before we let him wake up. If you’ll follow me?”
“Has he spoken at all?” Damien asked.
“Nothing,” the doctor replied. “He’s aware of us, reacts to our tests and can clearly hear us. I could tell that even if I didn’t have electrodes in his brain to monitor his hardware.
“He is capable of hearing and speech; he is just choosing not to speak,” Nguyen continued. “I’ve also detected at least half a dozen attempts to activate not only his entire implant suite but multiple secondary suites, two of which we didn’t even know were there!”
“Has he had any luck?”
“If he’d successfully activated anything, I wouldn’t be letting you in the same room as him,” the doctor said flatly. “Right now, he’s conscious and aware but mostly helpless.”
“I don’t necessarily trust helpless,” Damien replied dryly. “Guard in the room?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Leave him there. Denis, join me.”
“Yes, sir.”
#
Damien and Romanov stepped into the undecorated recovery room together, though the bodyguard quickly split off to join the exosuited Royal Guardsman against the wall. The door slid shut behind them, locking to impose a further measure of security on the recovery ward at the heart of the main fortress of the Protectorate’s government.
The man on the bed looked far less intimidating and dangerous than he had the previous night. With wires and pads attached to half a dozen points on his body and multiple taped-down sections of gauze covering sewn-shut bullet wounds, the impression was more frailty than danger.
That impression, Damien suspected, was false. Blind and injured, the prisoner was still likely more dangerous than most people on the planet.
He checked the screens on the wall and smiled.
“I know you’re awake and that you’re aware I’m here,” he told the prisoner as he grabbed a chair. “I’m hoping you
can answer some questions for me.”
The prisoner said nothing.
“My name is Damien Montgomery,” Damien said. “I suspect you’ve heard of me—you are, after all, a Legatan Augment on Mars.”
That got a reaction, though still only really visible on the monitors behind the man.
Damien waited patiently, sitting and watching the strange man who’d tried to kill him.
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” the prisoner finally rasped out. “You fuckers took my eyes.”
“That is not true,” Damien replied. “Your implants are disabled because we can’t tell the difference between your combat implants and the ones your body has grown dependent on. There are very few military-grade cyberneticists on Mars. They’re coming,” he noted, “but they aren’t here yet.”
He studied the prisoner carefully.
“Now, if you were a prisoner of war, you wouldn’t have to tell me anything beyond your name, rank, and serial number,” he told the man. “But since we’re not at war with Legatus, that leaves you in a messy position.
“You’re a civil prisoner, one caught in the act of terrorism,” Damien concluded flatly. “That’s one of the few things Mars dusts the death penalty off for, though we probably won’t in this case.
“Just that you’re here is going to cause Legatus all kinds of problems,” he continued. “You could answer my questions and perhaps give the bastard who left you to swing against a Hand some problems too, or you can let him get away. I’m still going to hang your government out to dry for your actions either way.”
He smiled grimly.
“So, how about that name and rank, soldier?” he demanded.
The silence stretched on for at least a minute, and then the Augment sighed.
“My team?”
“All dead, I’m sorry,” Damien told him. “We were trying to rescue Meir; taking prisoners among her murderers wasn’t a priority.”
The cyborg sighed again, a long, slow exhalation.
Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5) Page 18