The President of la Cámara de Senadores de Nueva Bolivia—the President of the Chamber of Senators of Nueva Bolivia—led the way through the doors. There was a large antechamber on the other side, presumably normally full of security equipment and milling crowds but today reduced to empty marble.
At the other end of the antechamber, Peron knocked on another set of double doors. They opened smoothly as well, and the woman in white led the way into the main hall of the dome.
They descended down the steps in absolute silence, the red armor of the thirty Royal Guards a sharp contrast to the pure white marble of the steps.
There was, at least, more color than that here. Each deputy and senator sat behind a desk hung with a brilliantly colored tapestry showing their region of the planet. All of those delegates were silent as Roslyn accompanied Alexander to the dais at the center of the amphitheater.
The Royal Guards split off as they reached the center, most of them forming a firm red line between the Asamblea Legislativa and the Crown Princess of Mars. Von Sulzbach and a team of three accompanied Roslyn and Alexander onto the stage, falling into a rough line behind the two women as Alexander turned to face her audience.
“Senadores y Diputados de la Asamblea Legislativa, I present to you Mage-Admiral Jane Alexander, la Princesa Heredera de la Protectorado de Marte.”
Roslyn wasn’t sure if the silence that answered had been the Asamblea’s plan or if they were intimidated by the presence of the exosuited Royal Guards and the Protectorate Guard Regiment outside.
Alexander certainly didn’t seem bothered by the silence, returning it in kind for at least ten seconds as she studied the Asamblea.
“So?” she finally said loudly. No one had handed her a microphone, but her voice was clearly projected electronically to the farthest reaches of the space. “Your Governor asked me to come here and address you. Like him, you appear to think that sheer stubbornness can change reality.
“What do you expect me to say?” she asked. “Well? You asked me to be here.”
Only silence answered her, and Alexander smiled thinly.
“Well, then. I am here because you have refused to validate the surrender terms signed by your Governor and there is some legal question around whether those terms are binding without that validation,” she reminded them. “So, I will be blunt: regardless of whether this Asamblea decides to validate the exact terms of Nueva Bolivia’s surrender, Nueva Bolivia has surrendered.”
Roslyn concealed a shiver at the iciness of Alexander’s tone. She’d been Crown Princess before she’d been a Navy officer, and she’d been a Navy officer for longer than Roslyn had been alive. The Mage-Admiral knew how to wield her tone like a knife.
“The terms I agreed to with Governor Hans South Isle allow Nueva Bolivia to retain self-government within the confines of our military occupation. Those terms include respecting the authority and independence of this body.
“If this body does not validate those terms, I have no need to respect your authority or independence,” Alexander said bluntly. “If you refuse to accept the surrender, then I will treat you as if you had not surrendered. You will make no grand gestures and you will not be martyrs. You will be ignored.
“Under the terms I have agreed to, you will continue as the elected government of your people. If those terms are rejected, then I will move to a new set of terms that only acknowledge Governor South Isle’s authority.”
She spread her hands.
“I would prefer not to do that,” she told them. “It is and always has been the preference of the Protectorate and the Royal Family of Mars to encourage democracy—outside, of course, replacing ourselves.
“But if you attempt to force my hand, you will not like the tools I reach for,” she concluded.
There was quiet conversation in the room now, but no one dared to shout disagreement.
“I understand that there has not yet been a conclusive vote, as the Asamblea continues to drag this out,” Alexander said. “I suggest you have that vote.”
With a firm nod to Peron, the Mage-Admiral stepped forward to the edge of the stage. Roslyn kept step with her and spotted the moment Alexander stumbled, her right leg giving way to some invisible weakness.
She couldn’t visibly prop up the Crown Princess of Mars in front of their enemies, but she could do something. Magic wove under Roslyn’s fingers, catching Alexander before the Admiral could do more than stumble.
Alexander kept walking as if nothing had happened, and Roslyn followed, trying to hide her concern. She’d occasionally worried over the Mage-Admiral’s age, but that was the first sign of any physical weakness she’d ever seen from Alexander.
And with all of the care and medicine available to her, Jane Alexander should have the health of a woman half her age…
17
“I’m fine,” Alexander hissed as they left the Asamblea Domo behind them and Roslyn stepped in to check on her. “I tripped, that’s all. Thank you for the save, Lieutenant. It was appreciated.”
Roslyn blinked in surprise. She wouldn’t have been able to tell which of the Mages around her had caught her in Alexander’s place. The Mage-Admiral’s secrets clearly included things she hadn’t realized.
“It seemed the Lieutenant had things in hand,” von Sulzbach murmured. “Are you certain you’re okay, sir?” he asked. “We should get you back to the vehicle.”
“Fine, fine,” Alexander confirmed, moving forward determinedly.
Roslyn shared a concerned look with von Sulzbach’s helmet. Now that they were back out in natural light, the Admiral looked gray and wan in a way she’d never seen before.
They got Alexander into the transport and properly seated, and von Sulzbach produced a bottle of water from inside one of the exosuit’s storage compartments.
“This is chilled,” he told the Admiral. “Drink. You need it.”
Despite her protests of being fine, Alexander took the water without hesitation and gulped down several swallows of it, closing her eyes as the vehicle started to slowly move back toward the shuttleport.
“Thank you, Captain,” she said, then took several more swallows. “Of all the days to have caught a bloody cold or whatever the hell this is. Hopefully, I made the right impression before I tried to fall off the stage.”
“I think so,” Roslyn replied. “Assuming we were trying to scare the crap out of them.”
“Basically,” the Admiral confirmed with a chuckle that turned into a hacking cough. “Fuck.” She shook her head. “I don’t really give a shit about local legislators. But the locals do, and that means having them on side will make our lives easier down the road.”
Alexander stared at the water bottle in her hand blankly for a moment before she started coughing again.
“Drink,” von Sulzbach told her. “Please.”
The transport was passing through the Guard Regiment, but they were moving faster than had been planned for. No one had said anything, but the Royal Guard was clearly rushing to get Alexander back to her ship.
The Admiral took another gulp of water, only to choke on it. She spluttered and coughed, spitting the water back out as she tried to pound her chest. Heavy breathing followed as her face turned even more gray.
“I can breathe,” she assured them. “Just went down the wrong pipe. I’m…I’m not fine.”
“We’re on our way back to the shuttle,” Roslyn assured her. “We’ll get you back to Durendal and our doctors ASAP. You’ll be fine.”
“Good, good,” Alexander said vaguely. “Is…is…my arms hurt. Everything’s tight. Everything’s…”
Her eyes rolled back in her head and the Mage-Admiral collapsed into her chair.
“Shit,” von Sulzbach swore. “Chambers, get on a channel to the ship. We’re bringing the Admiral in on emergency evac. I think she’s having a fucking heart attack.”
Another compartment on the Royal Guard’s armor popped open, and von Sulzbach started pulling out assorted wires and patches
before bodily grabbing Alexander and laying her flat on the floor of the vehicle.
He tore open her uniform tunic and started applying the wires and patches to Alexander’s chest. There was a definite pause as both he and Roslyn tried to guess how to apply them around the whirling silver rune inlaid into the Admiral’s upper chest.
“Durendal control, this is Mage-Lieutenant Chambers,” she said into her wrist-comp once she had a channel open. “We have a medical emergency. Admiral Alexander appears to be having a heart attack. We’re heading back to the shuttle at maximum speed and preparing for emergency liftoff. Have a med-team standing by in the shuttle bay.”
“I’ve contacted the shuttle,” the driver told her as she closed the channel. “They’ll be ready for takeoff as soon as we get there.” Roslyn heard the woman swallow grimly. “They’re rushing the checklist, but we triple-safetied that shuttle last night; it’ll be fine.”
The patches and wires from von Sulzbach’s armor were all hooked up to Alexander now, and Roslyn watched helplessly as the Royal Guard worked. He pulled a syringe of something from inside his armor and injected it into Alexander’s neck before laying an armored gauntlet on the Admiral’s chest.
The exosuit commenced CPR, moving von Sulzbach’s hand automatically to apply and release carefully calibrated pressure every second.
Roslyn’s focus was on her Admiral. She barely noticed the exosuits closing in protectively around the transport as they approached. She did notice the extra Royal Guard who stepped up into the vehicle—that had to be their medic.
She was surprised when von Sulzbach put his helmet back up, though he kept the hand on Alexander’s chest. For a few seconds, everyone around her was either unconscious or helmeted, leaving her completely isolated.
Then they were in the shadow of the heavy lander and heading for the assault shuttle. With a launch anticipated, the Guard troopers they’d left behind had scattered, leaving the pad completely empty when Roslyn glanced up.
They were good to go…except that the shuttle ramp wasn’t down. She’d assumed they were going to drive the truck onto the shuttle.
She was staring at that when an armored bubble rose out of concealed compartments around the truck, covering the passengers entirely as they drove under the assault shuttle—and the shuttle’s engines came online.
Fire hammered down around them, the noise of the engines deafening and stunning Roslyn even as she stared at the lifting shuttle in confusion.
The prick of a hypodermic at the base of her neck finally snapped her out of her confusion as the impossible truth sunk home. They’d been betrayed.
The syringe was still stuck in her neck as she tried to smash away the hand of the person injecting her, but her hands only hit ceramic and metal. It was the Royal Guard medic who’d boarded as they approached the shuttleport.
She lunged away from the hands, trying to get her hands onto Alexander and teleport them clear, but she fell to one knee instead of moving across the car. Looking up at the faceless armor suits around her, Roslyn gave in to her rage and channeled magic to blast the traitors away.
And her power didn’t answer.
For the first time since she’d been a child, she reached for magic and there was nothing there. That shock held her in place long enough for the second effect of the drug to take effect.
The world went black.
18
“All right, everybody,” Shvets announced cheerfully as the stars stabilized on the viewscreens of Rhapsody in Purple’s bridge. “I won’t say welcome home, because fuck this place, but welcome back to Legatus and friendly skies.”
There were a lot fewer warships in those friendly skies than there had been when they left, Kelly noted. At least there was still a dreadnought orbiting Legatus itself, a reliable statement of ownership and control.
Kelly could imagine the Republic managing to steal Martian cruisers and destroyers, or maybe even rig up reasonable facsimiles of them. The new dreadnoughts, though, were far larger than anything the Republic had built.
“Set our course for the dreadnought,” she ordered Shvets. “Any sign of the other stealth ships?”
“I’m picking up at least one Rhapsody flying in formation with the dreadnought—looks like it’s Mjolnir,” Milhouse reported. “Might be a second one, but we aren’t exactly easy to pick out even when we aren’t being sneaky.”
“That’s the point, I suppose,” Kelly agreed. “Ping our friend over there and find out which one it is. Rhapsody in Yellow and Rhapsody in Bronze should either be here or arriving shortly.”
She coughed.
“They should both be here, in fact,” she admitted. “We ran a bit over schedule, what with all of the dodging gunships.”
“Where are we supposed to be checking in?” her husband asked, the shuttle pilot sitting in one of the bridge observer seats. “It’s not like there’s an MISS office around here.”
“First step is check in with the Navy and our compatriots,” Kelly replied. “We upload all of our data to the RMN and download all of the recent data from them and the other Rhapsodies. Then everybody goes through the compiled data on their own and we compare conclusions.
“Should only take a day or two, and then Mage-Admiral Alexander decides where she’s going to go pick a fight.”
“Once we tell her what we’ve found, anyway,” Shvets said. “If most of Second Fleet has moved on somewhere, I’m presuming the Admiral is with them.”
“Agreed,” Kelly told them. “But we’ll go through the data here. Who knows? MISS may even have sent someone out here to set up operations. We did occupy the capital of our only enemy, after all.”
She was expecting to have an actual superior present by now, in fact. If the Martian Interstellar Security Service hadn’t sent a large and skilled team to Legatus, they were being far more incompetent than she was used to her organization being.
“Ping back from our friends,” Milhouse reported. “Both Yellow and Bronze are here and, yes, that’s Mjolnir they’re hiding under the skirts of. We also have an encrypted package for you; I’m guessing orders.”
“I’ll decrypt and review in my office,” Kelly replied. “Keep an eye on what’s out there, people. Legatus might be occupied, but if the Republic is going to do something clever, they’re going to do it here.”
“Eyes are open,” Milhouse promised. “Anything sneaks up on us, I’m launching Shvets at them. They’ve got to be at least as lethal as any missile we have!”
Three different passwords, a thumbprint, and a retinal scan later, the data package sent over to Rhapsody in Purple finally decrypted for Kelly. It was roughly what she expected: a canned video file probably recorded as soon as Rhapsody had been detected.
They were still almost a light-minute out, so a recorded message was the only reasonable method of communication.
The older woman who appeared on her wallscreen wasn’t familiar to Kelly herself, though the covert ops ship captain definitely recognized the type. The woman had dark hair and flat gray eyes, with the tight wrinkles of someone who rarely smiled, and wore a perfectly fitted conservative blue suit.
“Captain LaMonte, I am Regional Director Gry Peyton,” the senior spy told her. “I have assumed operational authority for all MISS operations in the occupied territories of the Republic, including mission control for your scouting sweeps.
“We have full scan results from Rhapsody in Bronze and Rhapsody in Yellow. I look forward to adding the data from Rhapsody in Purple’s sweep, though I have to admit I hope you were more successful than they were.
“Our enemy continues to elude us, and the information we are finding here on Legatus is proving of surprisingly limited value.” Peyton shook her head. “Once you are in formation with Mjolnir, you’ll send the Navy the downloads from this mission.
“That was already agreed to. Any further data transfers to the military will go through my team. It shouldn’t add much of a delay, but it’ll help us keep a handle on the
information. We do, after all, know that the RMN was badly penetrated by RID operatives prior to the war.
“We can only be so confident that network was fully neutralized.”
Peyton paused thoughtfully, then shrugged.
“Once you’ve sent your data to the Navy, my team will set up a meeting with all three of the Rhapsody Captains,” she told Kelly. “Perhaps if we put our heads together, we might actually come up with some answers as to what the hell our enemy has been up to.”
The recording ended and Kelly sighed. Of course the addition of MISS bureaucracy there would result in a pissing match with the Navy. She was prepared to bet a good chunk of money that Peyton hadn’t put that rule in place until after Alexander had left the system.
Mage-Admiral Tarpinian was no pushover, but he wasn’t the Crown Princess of Mars.
19
The office building that Peyton had taken over was close enough to the spaceport that Kelly didn’t even need to take a car. She and the other two Rhapsody Captains were able to walk over to the building—escorted by Royal Martian Marines, of course.
Kelly doubted it was an accident that the MISS wasn’t using Protectorate Guard troops for their own security. The relationship between the RMMC and the MISS was a long and not-entirely-friendly one, but MISS knew the Marines.
They didn’t know the Guard, so they were sticking with the devil they knew.
The other two Rhapsody captains weren’t complete strangers to her, but she hadn’t met Captains Cynwrig Riber or Nekessa Hull in person before. It was a quiet walk across the shuttleport, as none of the three of them really knew what to say.
New bosses tended to have that effect in the intelligence community. A spy never knew just what standard of need-to-know the new superior was going to apply, after all.
They were ushered into the building by a pair of armed young women in unmarked fatigues and hustled quickly upstairs to Peyton’s office, clearly being kept from slowing down enough to get an impression of the space.
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