Despite how he’d started, however, Damien couldn’t quite see himself as just a Jump Mage or even a ship’s Captain anymore.
“You realize, I presume, that you should probably be sleeping?” Samara asked, the dark-skinned Inspector entering the room with silent grace. “The assault shuttles, as I understand, have decent odds against the crap the Front has for warships, but we still need you if we’re going to carry the day.
“You might have given up the Hand, but you still have the Rune,” she noted. “You’re still this ship’s most powerful armament.”
“Four more hours before we even stop accelerating,” he replied. “Five after that before we decelerate. So, I have…at least ten, twelve hours to get sleep.”
“Which leaves you spending your time staring at a projected starscape and moping,” she concluded. “Anything productive coming out of the navel-contemplation?”
“I rose so far above any ambition or dream I had as a child,” Damien said after a few moments’ hesitation. “I can’t go back to being a Jump Mage. I’d be a hazard to any ship I was on, a flashing target to every thug and bounty hunter in the galaxy.”
“I don’t think there’s many thugs or bounty hunters who are that stupid,” Samara told him. “I don’t suppose ‘quiet retirement’ is on your list?”
“I’m not even thirty-five, Inspector,” he said. “I owe humanity more than that.”
“Why?” she asked. “What do you owe anyone, Damien Montgomery? You’ve given more than most already.”
“I have more than most to give,” he replied. “There are only a handful of people in the galaxy who share my Gift. I’d be…selfish to turn away from so much need. So much strife.”
“Hands don’t die in bed,” Samara pointed out. “That’s the path you’ve been on. To an early death and a black tomb on the side of the Mountain.”
He winced. He’d been there when they’d buried Alaura Stealey, the Hand who’d trained him, in the shadowed basalt tombs at the foot of the field where the dead of the Olympus Project lay. Each Hand had a tomb there.
Many were empty, their occupants’ bodies lost to space and war.
“I volunteered,” he said. “I wasn’t drafted. I wasn’t conscripted. They gave me a chance to disappear quietly, but I chose to learn from the Mage-King and enter his service.”
He shook his head, studying their course.
“You’re right, of course,” he agreed. “Hands don’t die in bed. I haven’t expected to for…four years? Maybe longer. I stopped expecting to die in bed long before I entered His Majesty’s service.
“I’m not sure I have it in me to stop,” he admitted. “So, when I leave Mars, it will be for one duty or another.” He smiled, suddenly a bit more certain of himself. “I don’t know where yet,” he admitted, “but I know that much.
“I may have resigned my Hand, but I am far from done with the service I owe mankind.”
The MIS Inspector didn’t say anything in response to that. She just took a seat in the observer chair beside him, leaning back to look up at the stars with him in silence.
#
Chapter 31
Damien did, in the end, get a little over seven hours of sleep. There was medication involved, a carefully calculated risk, but there was nothing that was going to attack the little jump-yacht in the deep space of the Sol system without at least some hours of warning.
The medication kept the dreams at bay, which meant he woke up feeling more refreshed than he had in several days. A lazy, luxurious shower completed his restoration, and he pulled on his black suit and gloves, feeling somewhat human.
Then, of course, he went to put on his Hand and froze. Eventually, it would be real. Until then… He sighed and shook his head.
“Romanov, anything I need to be aware of?” he asked the Marine over the intercom.
“Things are quiet,” Romanov replied. “Training the sensor module on our target zone, though, and I’m not seeing much of…well, anything.”
“If you were hiding a secret base for a terrorist organization in the Sol system, how close would we have to get to see it?”
Romanov chuckled.
“Unless someone was arriving or leaving, inside the base,” he admitted. “Point taken, my lord.”
“Commencing deceleration in ten minutes,” Damien told him. “Once we’re obviously heading their way, that’s when I expect to see some activity. I doubt they’re up to RMMC levels of competence, after all.”
#
He settled back into the control chair, checking his access to the joysticks for immediate control and the ease of accessing the simulacrum he’d have to defend the ship with. On a screen to his immediate right, the countdown continued to tick away until the moment they would change course.
With a few keystrokes, Damien linked the screens to his right to the yacht’s sensors. The feed from the additional sensor module the Marines had mounted on the outside moved into the center of the view, the larger asteroids in the target zone highlighted by Akintola’s computers.
“All right,” he said aloud. “Let’s see how much attention you’re paying.”
Tapping another series of commands, he opened a shipwide channel.
“All hands, all hands, this is Montgomery,” he told them. “Stand by for five subjective gravities in thirty seconds. Secure yourselves and all loose objects. Five subjective gravities in twenty seconds from…now.”
The yacht shivered gently as she spun in space, aligning with her new vector, and then Damien grunted as five gravities of force slammed him back into the control couch. The couch was designed for just this purpose, gel pads absorbing the pressure and keeping him functional as his body complained against the massively increased weight.
They were still almost a light-minute and a half away, and he waited patiently for the time delay to pass. It would take ninety seconds for the light of Doctor Akintola’s new course to reach their destination, and ninety more seconds for the light of any response to reach him.
They were still five hours away. He could wait three or four minutes to see what his enemies were doing.
The answer, at least initially, was nothing. He hadn’t really expected a group of basically amateur insurrectionists to do more than that. It would take time for them to confirm that the ship was actually heading their way. Time for them to decide what to do. Even more time for them to act.
And much as Damien was impatient for them to show their hand, the longer they waited to act, the better odds he had of bringing them to bay.
He could wait.
#
And wait they did.
After half an hour, Damien’s estimate of their enemy started ratcheting downward fast. There was reacting slowly, and then there was missing the ship decelerating toward you at fifteen gravities on an antimatter rocket.
By the time they hit a light-minute’s separation, though, he was starting to wonder if there wasn’t something else going on. Their scans were showing nothing at all. No one was reacting to them. There were no ships there, just dead and silent asteroids.
“Munira, can you go over the sensor scans for me?” he asked the MIS Inspector. “I’m relatively sure I’m not missing any active ships, but unless we got the vector on that comm channel wrong, there has to be something there.”
Samara had already mirrored the sensor module’s feed to her own displays and was tearing into the data with a set of software tools Damien didn’t even pretend to understand.
“There is always another possibility,” she admitted. “We’ve been assuming that they were communicating directly with Kay, but they could have been using a relay or transmitting from a ship in transit…or, well, using a mobile relay.”
“I know,” he said grimly. “It was just all we had. We’re going to sweep the area anyway, so we’ll see what we see as we approach.”
“Wait…” Samara said slowly. “That’s odd.”
“What is?”
She highlighted a number
of objects sharing an orbit with the largest of the asteroids in their flagged area.
“These aren’t big enough to be on the regular charts,” she pointed out. “I’m not getting great resolution even on them now, but…spectrography says they’re artificial.”
“There isn’t supposed to be anything here at all.”
“Exactly. No idea what they are,” she admitted, “but they’re in the right place and they don’t belong. Might just be a relay, which we can strip for more data, but…”
“They might also have some answers of their own,” Damien agreed. “Keep on it, Inspector.”
#
The following hours only brought more questions as Doctor Akintola drew closer and they got a better look at the strange objects. There were dozens of them, identical skeletal steel cylinders a hundred meters long and at most five wide. Much of their construction was open to space, but solid rails ran the entire length of the objects.
They weren’t ships, they weren’t habitats, they weren’t… Damien had no idea what they were.
“Well, that’s at least one benefit out of those strange things,” Samara pointed out as they crossed the three-hundred-thousand-kilometer mark, still fully half an hour away from their zero-velocity rendezvous.
“I’m listening to any answers and any good news,” Damien said drily. “The complete lack of life other than those things is making me twitchy.”
“Well, there’s definitely a base of some kind on the asteroid they’re orbiting with,” she replied. “Does that count as signs of life?”
“Yes. Show me,” he ordered.
She manipulated the displays, mirroring her screen to one of his and zooming in.
The asteroid was just over a hundred kilometers long, and the base was tucked into the largest crater on one side. It wasn’t even a small complex. It was clearly assembled from standard prefabricated modules, a familiar sight in any star system of the Protectorate, but it had been done carefully and well.
A scale dropped onto one side of the screen, helping him judge the size of the base. Forty or so structures, linked together by surface tunnels. Roughly a kilometer or so across.
“That base could hold a thousand, two thousand people, easy,” Samara concluded. “Here and here.” She tapped a command and several modules flashed. “Those are docking ports. The asteroid doesn’t have enough gravity to cause any issues just flying a ship up and linking it.”
“But there’s nothing there,” Damien objected. “How many ships would we be looking at?”
“Hard to say,” she said. “Six docking ports. But…” She highlighted a flat portion of the crater. “That spot there is close enough for reasonable access by vac suit and has enough gravity to hold things down. It could easily hold three or four of the transports or thirty to forty of the shuttles we saw attacking Callisto.”
“So, minimum of six decent-sized ships,” he concluded. “Except we saw eight at Callisto. Six transports, two mining ships. All of them made it out. Could they have done repairs here?”
“It would be zero-gee work, but they’re Belt miners,” she told him. “They could do it and the hardware was certainly here, assuming they built those tubes in place.”
“Well, I’m only getting more questions at this point,” Damien admitted, “and there’s only one way to get my answers. Keep working on identifying those satellites.”
“What are you doing?”
“Denis and I are going to go invade a terrorist base.”
#
“No,” Romanov said flatly. “No, no, no. Not a chance.”
Damien looked at the Secret Service Special Agent calmly, waiting for him to get it out of his system.
“You might not be a Hand anymore, but you are my goddamned principal and it remains my job to keep you alive. I am not letting you take part in a hostile boarding action!”
“Denis, I am not the Captain of a ship or a pampered diplomat,” Damien pointed out. “My job is to be in the middle of the action, providing protection and fire support and dealing with problems.
“Not only that, but I need to see what’s on this base for myself—and if there is anyone left, I’m more likely to be able to take them alive than your Marines are. And Hand or not, I am in charge here.
“So, now that we’ve established that you don’t get to bar me from the operation, what compromise would you suggest?” he asked.
For a moment, Romanov looked like he was going to suggest something along the lines of tying Damien up and locking him in a closet, then the Marine finally sighed.
“You can come on the third shuttle,” he said. “It’s the same one I’ll be on. I’m not supposed to lead from the front any more than you are, after all.”
“Now, that, Agent, is more reasonable,” Damien agreed. As they spoke, he was discarding his suit jacket and dress shirt for an armored vest that covered his torso but left the Runes on his arms fully visible.
There would be no subtlety or concealment today. Not many would recognize the Runes, but exposing them also meant he wouldn’t be burning off clothes when he activated them.
The men and women around him clambered into exosuits and slowly boarded their shuttles. Romanov waited for Damien once he’d strapped on his own massive suit of armor.
“That’s it?” he asked. “Just the vest?”
Damien smiled and grabbed two more items from the locker—a pistol and a breath mask.
“Not quite, but mostly,” he agreed. “If we’re dealing with vacuum, I’ll consider upgrading, but I don’t need much, Denis. You know that.”
“I know that,” the Marine replied, shaking his head. “Still can’t help feeling you should wear something more substantial.”
“I promise to hide behind the men and women in the two-meter suits of armor if trouble starts,” Damien told him. “If that makes you feel better.”
The Marine shook his head.
“Not really,” he admitted. “Our shuttle’s over here, my lord.”
Damien shook his own head in turn.
“You all really need to stop calling me that,” he pointed out.
“No, we don’t,” Romanov said calmly. “Shall we?”
#
Chapter 32
Strapped into the acceleration couch in the assault shuttle’s officers’ compartment, Damien watched the sensor feed from Doctor Akintola as they drew closer. Romanov was next to him, radiating calm readiness even through the centimeters-thick shell of the exosuit.
If there was any reaction from the hidden base they were approaching, the shuttles would launch immediately. Their weapons systems were light, basically nonexistent compared to a true warship, but they were also primarily designed for ground bombardment.
Against any weapon the Belt Liberation Front might have attached to the base to defend it, the shuttles were a far larger threat than the unarmed yacht carrying them.
The base remained silent as they approached, however, not even so much as a chirp of a traffic controller. If Damien couldn’t make out lights in the base, he’d wonder if it had been abandoned long before.
“All right,” Samara said over his earpiece. “We are coming to a halt, zero velocity relative to the asteroid, at just under five hundred kilometers. We’re only ten kilometers from the closest of those tubes.”
“What are the scans showing of the base?” Damien asked. They had a mirror of Akintola’s scan data, but Samara had access to the full array plus the yacht’s more powerful computers. “If we can spare a shuttle to check out those orbitals, I’d like to get a better idea of what the hell the things are.”
“Most of the base is dark and looks like it might have been for years,” the MIS Inspector replied. “Cold as the rock around it. The area around the docking ports and between the ports and the landing pad area is still warm; looks like it has power and lights. Looks like there’s four standard prefab fusion reactors in the base, but only one is running.”
“If the place is mostly empty, we
can probably spare a squad to check the satellites,” Romanov noted. “Something about them is making me twitchy.”
“Join the club,” Damien muttered. “All right. Romanov, let’s get your people moving. Send a shuttle to the nearest satellite and take the rest of us down.”
The Marine started giving orders and Damien switched to a private channel with Samara.
“Are there any power sources on those satellites?” he asked.
“Nothing active,” she told him. “If I could trace the power flow, I’d have a better idea of what we’re looking at.”
The shuttle vibrated as the first of the spacecraft lifted off and drifted out the back of the jump-yacht.
“Can you tell if there’s anyone actually on the ground?”
“No,” Samara admitted. “I can tell you where they have light and heat, but the sensors aren’t refined enough to pick that up. My guess is you’re looking at a skeleton caretaking staff, though. Most of them will be on the ships…and I have no idea where those are.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Damien said as his own shuttle lifted off. “We’re back to hoping there’s answers down there, because I’m starting to get nervous again.”
#
As Damien had agreed with Romanov, their shuttle hung back as the first pair of landing craft dropped like homesick rocks towards the asteroid base “below” them. A fourth shuttle was beginning the slow and tricky process of matching velocities with the orbiting and gently spinning cylinder they were being sent to investigate, and the last shuttle took up a high overwatch orbit, its missile racks extended to cover the rest of the spacecraft.
The first two shuttles dropped to hard landings on the clear pad the Front had used for much the same purpose, then each disgorged their twenty-strong Marine squads. Exosuited troopers advanced by fire teams across the open area to reach the airlocks.
Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5) Page 22