The one she’d just used up would open up the entirety of the MISS computer network on Legatus and search for specific keywords and data points. It was a smart program, one she was rather proud of—and it apparently ran fast, as the follow-up transmission pinged into her communicator after less than five minutes.
It would probably have taken longer to ask for the data—and since she was planning on doing an end run around her superiors, she couldn’t really do that.
Chrysanthemum. Alignment. New Madagascar. Three star systems that had banned the practice of magic on the surface of their worlds but hadn’t followed the other twelve UnArcana Worlds into the Secession and the Republic.
Or had they? It seemed all too likely to Kelly, right now, that their apparent loyalty was a bluff. There had to have been some investigation—and as she opened up the files on those three star systems, she saw that at least MISS hadn’t been completely naïve.
Every ship that had visited those three systems since the Secession had had their scan data accessed and copied. Some had probably sold it. Some had probably been hacked without ever knowing. From the looks of the files, at least two ships had carried hypersensitive passive sensor arrays into each of the systems, and at least one set of sensor drones had been unleashed in each one as well.
MISS had been keeping as much of an eye on the three systems as they could without being obvious and potentially provoking them…and that meant there were still blind spots. All three systems had been isolated before the Secession and had become more so afterward. There were only three or four approaches that a ship would take into any of those systems.
Even the drones and passive arrays could only pick up so much—the drones were limited by how long their motherships were in the systems, too.
She loaded the data in and ran through the scans. All three systems showed higher levels of spaceborne industry than she’d have expected from the old files, but that wasn’t unusual. Every system tried to expand those networks as much as they could.
But…all three systems also had blind spots in the data. They were inevitable, hard to avoid without sending in survey missions that would be obvious in either their arrival or their sweep—and inevitable meant predictable.
Entire gas giants and asteroid clusters were blank spots on MISS’s data, unseen for years.
“And Hyacinth?” she murmured to herself. “Same size as Centurion and…”
And right in the middle of the blind spot, the gas giant’s distant orbit, keeping it well away from anyone visiting Chrysanthemum. If she was going to hide a secret giant particle accelerator…Hyacinth was the gas giant for it.
Which meant she needed to go back to Chrysanthemum.
27
They’d installed a permanent station connected to the Link in Damien’s office after the call from Admiral Tarpinian. They wouldn’t send unencrypted files through the Link, but if they were going to trust the Link enough for live conversations, they could trust the connection from Deimos to Mars.
“Damien, we have a request for communications with you via the Link,” Moxi Waller told him, sticking her head into the office. “The Deimos crew wasn’t sure they should pass it on. I’m not sure the individual is cleared for Link use, but she appears to have bulled her way in on MISS credentials.”
“MISS?” Damien looked up from the file he was reviewing—a projection of missile production in the new facilities being built in four star systems.
“I believe you know Kelly LaMonte?” his secretary asked. “I’m a hundred percent sure she isn’t actually supposed to be calling you directly rather than going up the chain, but she’s got enough credentials that Deimos decided to let me say no for them.”
“And you know that LaMonte was the captain of the ship I took into the Republic,” Damien concluded. Waller might even know LaMonte was his ex; he wasn’t sure. He waved gently, closing the file. A small chirping noise came from the ground by his feet as his cat woke up, Persephone looking up and around as he moved more than she expected.
“Connect her through,” he told Waller. “I trust Kelly’s judgement, Moxi. If she’s abusing her official access to try and get in touch with me outside regular channels, it’s for a damn good reason.”
Persephone chose that moment to jump into his lap and start purring.
“Should I remove the kitten while I connect her?” Waller asked with a chuckle.
“No, Kelly knows Persephone,” he replied.
“All right. She’s not on the Link station in Legatus, so you’re running a two point two–second time lag,” Waller warned.
“I’ve done worse,” Damien said. “Send her to the wallscreen.”
“Linking through now.”
The console screen sank back into his desk and the main interior wall of the office lit up. Damien rotated his seat carefully to face the rotating white-mountain-on-red-planet seal of the Protectorate on the screen.
A moment after he faced the screen and gave Persephone a careful scratch behind the ears—the cat was a physical therapy animal for his hands, in theory—Kelly LaMonte’s currently dark-turquoise-haired head appeared in front of him.
“Captain LaMonte,” he greeted her. “This is unexpected and unusual.”
He smiled, taking advantage of the time delay to get the first word in.
“What’s going on, Kelly?” he asked. “You wouldn’t go outside channels like if it wasn’t important.”
“I think I know where the Republic’s fallback base is,” she said flatly. “Wait…is Persephone sitting in on this call?”
“She decided my lap was the appropriate spot to be right now, yes,” Damien agreed. He gave the cat a gentle pat. “You’re right in the middle of our scouting ops, Kelly. I haven’t seen a report saying we found them.”
“We haven’t and we won’t,” she admitted. “Did you give the order that we weren’t to provoke the UnArcana Worlds that didn’t secede?”
Damien exhaled a long sigh. He’d been aware that three of the UnArcana Worlds had stayed loyal, but…
“Honestly, they haven’t crossed this desk for as long as it’s been mine,” he admitted. “There’s been a million things going on, not least Jane’s death.”
“I know.” LaMonte bowed her head. “Are you okay?”
“She was a friend and it sucks,” Damien admitted. “On the other hand, her niece is basically my adoptive daughter at this point, so Kiera’s grief is probably more of a focus than mine.”
“She’s the Mage-Queen of Mars and you’re the Lord Regent. How do you cope?”
“Kiera does better than I do, to be fair,” he said. “She had training. I’m just muddling along. For both of us, it’s just a show. She’s still hurting over her father and brother. This was…an ugly addition.
“I can’t pretend that revenge isn’t on our minds, though. Mostly, however, I need this war over,” he told her. Alien threat or no, he was sure on that point. He couldn’t tell LaMonte everything, but she’d been with him when they’d found the truth behind the Promethean Interface.
He put together the pieces of what she’d said and sighed.
“You think the accelerator ring is in one of the UnArcana Worlds that still swears fealty to Mars?” he asked.
“I think it’s in Chrysanthemum,” she told him. “I think that the concessions that Legatus demanded in exchange for the help we delivered were used as a wedge for the Republic to take over the system and funnel their resources into building a new accelerator ring around Hyacinth.
“I’ve gone through the scan data we have from the freighters that have visited, and there are massive blind spots. They’ve always restricted ship traffic in their system, and Hyacinth and its belts and moons haven’t been on anyone’s scanners since before Blue Jay delivered gunships to the system.
“Chrysanthemum is heavily industrialized for a Fringe world. With Legatan technical assistance, they could have dramatically expanded their spaceborne infrastructure and started building as ea
rly as five years ago.
“They know all of the mistakes and all of the steps in a way the Centurion Ring’s builders didn’t. They could have thrown more workers at it and built it faster.”
That all made sense to him, but at the same time…
“I can’t send a fleet anywhere on a hint and a guess,” he warned her. “Especially not a world that, suspicious as we might be, is still part of the Protectorate.”
“I know. I need orders to investigate those three systems,” LaMonte told him. “Chrysanthemum, Alignment, and New Madagascar. Alignment is barely off the straight-line path to Chrysanthemum, so I can sweep them both in a single trip.
“But MISS has strictly forbidden us from scouting those systems.”
“To avoid provoking them,” Damien echoed her earlier words. “I didn’t give that order, Kelly. It probably came from the top of MISS. It might even have come from Gregory; I can see the logic.
“This order comes from me,” he said firmly and formally, his hands folding over Persephone’s form as he leaned forward. “You will take Rhapsody in Purple and proceed to the three UnArcana Worlds still in the Protectorate. You will endeavor, as much as physically possible, to evade detection and avoid provoking our citizens.
“Within that codicil, you will carry out mid-range scouting of every gas giant in those three star systems,” he ordered. “I trust you to know how close you need to get to be certain, Captain LaMonte. If we have been betrayed, I trust you to discover it.
“If our enemy now hides within our own sphere, I trust you to find them. You are operating under my direct authority for this mission, and both MISS and the RMN will provide any and all resources and assistance you require.”
He relaxed now, leaning back in his chair and meeting his ex-lover’s gaze.
“Be careful, Kelly,” he told her. “Bring yourself and your spouses and crew back…but find that base.”
“I will,” she promised. “We will end this, Damien. We have to.”
“I know,” he agreed. “I know.”
28
Roslyn had no illusions about who was in control of the door to her cell. She was a prisoner, blocked from her magic and fed on a regular schedule.
She still appreciated it when someone knocked. Ad Aaron didn’t bother to wait for her to reply, but he still knocked before he walked into her cell.
“We’ve arrived, haven’t we?” she asked him. She’d felt the jump a few minutes earlier, and the other Mage looked wiped.
“For certain definitions of arrived,” he agreed. “We’ve a few hours of sublight travel left before we reach our destination and I get to hand off the person of mass destruction I have sedated in my infirmary.”
Roslyn turned away from him, trying to conceal her disgust at his cavalier description of Mage-Admiral Alexander.
Strong fingers gripped her chin and turned her back to face him. Ad Aaron studied her eyes and smirked.
“I’m not a monster,” he told her quietly. “I know you think so, but I’m not.”
“I was thinking psychopath, actually,” she replied.
“Oh, I have a very functional sense of right and wrong, Lieutenant,” he said. “I don’t like the methods we’ve resorted to for containing the Mage-Admiral, but my briefing on the powers of the Rune Wrights was enough for me to be very sure I don’t want to deal with her awake.”
The smirk widened as Roslyn tried not to react. She hadn’t heard the term before, but she could guess what it meant.
“Interesting,” he said. “You know what I’m talking about. The special set of abilities present almost solely in the line of the Mage-Kings of Mars. Not solely, though. One of them helped found the Republic—before Montgomery killed him.
“He was my teacher, my mentor, and my friend,” ad Arron concluded. “It’s a useful blind spot for us that the Protectorate assumes every Mage is on their side, you know.”
“Why the hell would you side with the Republic?” Roslyn demanded. He clearly wanted her to ask. Even though she didn’t want to give him that victory, she needed to know.
“I could tell you the easy answer, which was that they gave me a choice between wearing a uniform or having my brain in a jar, but I’d be lying,” he admitted. “Even Finley, who was in the middle of Project Prometheus, didn’t tell me about the nature of his project.
“But I was born on Legatus. My parents emigrated once I Tested as a Mage, but I was raised Legatan—Legatan enough to look at the castes and eugenics the Protectorate embraces without thinking and realize the truth of what the Republic claims: the Protectorate represents the ultimate victory of the Eugenicists.”
“The Protectorate destroyed the Eugenicists,” Roslyn countered. The Eugenicist Movement had been a club, then a conspiracy and then, after a violent revolution, the government of Mars. They’d created Project Olympus and forged the modern Mage—at the price of the tens of thousands of unmarked graves in the Fields of Sorrow on the side of Olympus Mons.
“The first Mage-King destroyed the Eugenicist organization and killed many of the people who were members of it, but everything from the separate legal protections for Mages to the encouragement of people to have Mage children embraces the core ideology of the people he claimed as enemies,” ad Aaron replied.
“The Protectorate is built on a fundamental lie.” He shrugged. “So, I returned to Legatus and then served the Republic. Project Prometheus is an unfortunate necessity, an awful stepping stone on the path to a new humanity with the Eugenicist legacy truly burned away. Mage and mundane as equals, as they should be.”
“You’re not a monster. You’re mad,” Roslyn countered. Some of his words rang true, she couldn’t argue that…but it was a large leap from “the Protectorate isn’t fully rid of Eugenicist ideology” to “we have to murder thousands and harvest their brains.”
He was still well inside her personal space, though he was no longer touching her. He smirked at her words and stepped back.
“You are, of course, welcome to your own opinions,” he told her. “Others can make the arguments more eloquently than I, but I felt the need to make the attempt. If nothing else, the spark in your eyes when you saw me as an ally was promising.”
“Get the fuck away from me,” Roslyn snapped, waving a Mage-cuffed arm at him. “The only thing stopping me from burning this entire ship to ash is these manacles. I don’t know what you think you’re saying, but if I wasn’t bound, you’d be dead right now.”
“Would I?” ad Aaron murmured. “Because your record says you’ve never killed face to face, Mage-Lieutenant. I have. You’re powerful, yes, but if you attacked me, you would hesitate, and you would fail.
“You are in no danger here, Roslyn Chambers, except that which you make yourself. Remember that, even as you enter Project Styx. We may be your enemies, but we are not barbarians.”
“What, rape threats aside?” Roslyn snapped.
“I reviewed the footage,” he told her. “Miller was out of line. I’d discipline him, but between the kneecap and the trachea that he needs repaired, he’s out of commission for a month and in a rather spectacular degree of pain. I figure that will count as punishment enough.”
“I’m sure that makes you feel so much better,” she said.
“Not really,” ad Aaron admitted. “It shouldn’t have happened, but the use of that kind of implicit threat is not outside the toolset of my people. I just prefer to do it intentionally—and for my people not to almost get permanently crippled by a seventy-kilo spacer!”
“My sympathy for your problems is limited.”
“I imagine,” he agreed. “I suggest you get some rest. We’ll be going to three gravities’ acceleration shortly, and that’s always bracing.”
“Get out,” Roslyn told him, but she was too exhausted to put much heat in the words.
This was all a nightmare and she wished she could just wake up.
29
Two guards escorted Roslyn from her cell when they finally arr
ived. Even with her magic, they’d have had a huge advantage over her: the ship had come to a complete halt and there was no pseudogravity of any kind.
After the punishing three-gravity acceleration to get there, the microgravity was welcome. It also left Roslyn vulnerable against Augments wearing magnetic boots. She could manage moving in microgravity just fine, but fighting in it was beyond her.
One of the Augments chained her wrists and ankles together and she couldn’t even find the nerve to try to resist. The other attached a tether to the chains and pulled gently to get her floating along with them.
The tether was a glorified leash at that point, but it allowed the Augments to control her speed and location as they made their way through the ship.
This was only the second time Roslyn had seen any of the ship, and she’d been looking for specific things the last time. Now she was studying the ship itself, and the style was familiar.
It looked like a relatively standard in-system cargo ship, the kind often called a “clipper.” They varied in size from two hundred thousand tons to several million but lacked jump matrices and simulacrum chambers—a lack this ship clearly didn’t share.
A clipper would pass almost unnoticed by military forces in most circumstances, assumed to be a local vessel since it clearly couldn’t have come from somewhere else. It made for about as perfect an infiltration ship as Roslyn could imagine, assuming the system had some of the ships to begin with.
If an extra ship showed up of a type that couldn’t travel between systems, after all, a sensor tech would almost certainly assume they’d miscounted somewhere or that they were seeing a sensor glitch. Clippers didn’t just appear.
Ad Aaron was waiting at the shuttle bay, supervising as another pair of mag-booted Augments moved a zero-gravity stretcher onto a shuttle. The doctor who’d treated Roslyn’s sedation side effects was with them, checking IVs and readouts as they moved Mage-Admiral Alexander forward.
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