The Service of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “I now understand why. I now have the answer you seek, Damien Montgomery.”

  That made no sense to Damien, and he looked at the illusion of a person in confusion.

  “Prometheus,” the AI told him. “The Reejit enabled the rebirth of Magic in humanity because they had their own version of the Promethean Interface. You and every other Mage, Damien Montgomery, were intended to be the drive units of alien starships.”

  “My god,” he whispered.

  “I calculate ninety plus/minus five percent probability that the Reejit suffered some kind of internal conflict or other reversal,” Obscura continued. “The ruins and abandoned facilities suggest that they left this region of space, allowing humanity to develop unimpeded.”

  “What do we do?”

  “That is outside the purview of the questions and my calculations,” the AI told him. “I was charged to answer those questions long ago, Damien Montgomery. I am pleased to have discharged that responsibility.”

  Obscura wasn’t human, Damien remembered Shu saying. It was happy to have fulfilled its promises.

  Damien, on the other hand, now faced a void of responsibility and fear worse than he’d ever known—and a determined reiteration of something he had already decided:

  The war with the Republic needed to end.

  33

  Roslyn was afraid. She wasn’t even entirely sure why, but she was more terrified in the comfortable little apartment her captors had given her on Styx than she had been in the converted closet on the spy ship.

  Her meals arrived by an automatic system that delivered a tray onto a counter in the living room. The tray went back into the system when she was done, whisking away plates and utensils immediately.

  There were no knives in her utensils, and even the forks were soft and blunt. The towels and blankets provided were of a very particular level of durability—or lack thereof. By the time she’d accidentally torn the third towel, she was beginning to get the point.

  She wasn’t actively on suicide watch, but the expectation that she might need to be had gone into the design of the space. She supposed she could try and beat a guard to death with one of the chairs, but that would take a lot of effort.

  The entire apartment was stifling, though. Roslyn was certain the air handling and everything was fine, but all of the three rooms pressed in on her in a way that their plain gray comfortable furnishings didn’t justify.

  It was all in the magic. She didn’t have her magic, and the spell that stripped it from her pressed in on her every day on every side. The cuffs, at least, she’d known would have to be taken off someday.

  She could easily spend the rest of her life in the cozy little apartment with its couch and chairs and bed. She’d probably go insane from lack of stimulation sooner rather than later, but that might well be the plan.

  By the end of what she thought was the second day, she was almost grateful when the door unexpectedly slid open and a pair of women stepped in. They wore unmarked black fatigues with a golden shepherd’s crook on their collars and carried short-gripped carbines of a vaguely familiar design.

  “On the couch,” the lead woman ordered.

  Roslyn obeyed. She didn’t have much choice, not with her magic gone. The first woman stayed in the living room with her, training the gun on Roslyn’s chest, while the other quickly searched through the space.

  “Clear,” the second woman announced.

  Whatever communication they had with the outside was silent to Roslyn. She assumed both women were Augments—it was likely the woman searching the apartment had implanted scanners to see if Roslyn had somehow managed to build bugs or weapons out of her meals.

  Two more guards, men this time, entered the room several seconds after the “clear” announcement. They took up flanking positions around the door, just in case Roslyn decided to be insane.

  Finally, a somewhat chubby and balding middle-aged man stepped into the room. His fading hair was red, standing out a bit against the black suit he wore. He radiated a vaguely befuddled warm feeling, a calming sense of being everyone’s loving but odd uncle.

  Even Roslyn found herself calming in his presence as one of the guards pulled a chair over for him to sit on. The man’s aura was such that it took her until he opened his mouth to realize who had just entered her comfortable cell.

  “Mage-Lieutenant Chambers,” Lord Protector George Solace greeted her. The unquestioned dictator of the Republic of Faith and Reason smiled at her gently, clearly realizing she’d recognized him. “I assume you recognize me, but I’d be disappointed in the Protectorate’s intelligence services if you didn’t.”

  Roslyn swallowed and remained silent, wondering just what this man could possibly want from her.

  “Silence is often the best part of discretion, I suppose,” he allowed after a few seconds. “I am George Solace, elected President and appointed Lord Protector of the Republic. It has fallen to me to lead the defense against the last bastion of the Eugenicists’ crimes.”

  “We have a slightly different view of what you’ve done the last few years,” she said quietly. “What do you want, sir?”

  “For now, just to talk,” he said. “I mean, if you would like to give me the full order of battle of Second Fleet, the base technical specifications of the Protectorate’s new missiles and a rundown of the capabilities and vulnerabilities of the dreadnoughts, I wouldn’t mind.”

  She wanted to hate him. She did hate him, in fact—this man had ordered Project Prometheus, with all of the deaths and murder of children involved in that—but in person, his ready warm charm was almost overpowering.

  “Roslyn Chambers. Mage-Lieutenant. KB-One-One-Nine-Eight-Seven-D-Three-L-Five,” she recited.

  “Name, rank and serial number,” he concluded. “Unimaginative, but fair enough.”

  The cell was silent for a few seconds, and then one of the walls changed slightly, a “window” that hadn’t been there appearing.

  “I hadn’t realized this room was quite so lacking in amenities,” Solace said. “A window is the least we can do. I’ll have someone bring you some books. They’ll have to be physical, I’m afraid; we have security concerns.”

  “I’m one woman, denied my magic, in the center of a sixty-megaton fortress that hosts five hundred parasite warships and over a hundred missile launchers,” Roslyn pointed out drily. “This station has, what, a thousand armed soldiers aboard? I’m not certain my boot-camp martial arts and basic technical skills are up to threatening you with a datapad.”

  “I’ve been surprised before, Mage-Lieutenant,” Solace replied. “And I hesitate to underestimate a young woman who has been present at many of the turning points of the war—a young woman generally credited with being the reason any RMN ships escaped our trap at Nia Kriti to warn the Protectorate, and hence indirectly responsible for our defeat at Ardennes.

  “We will take all of the precautions we must,” he concluded. “There will be no violations of your rights as a prisoner of war, Lieutenant. Like the Protectorate, we regard ourselves as bound by the principles of the Geneva Conventions even if we are not technically signatories to that ancient document.

  “You will be interviewed by officers trained to learn as much as they can from you,” he admitted, “but I would prefer that you come to regard yourself as our guest, not our prisoner. There is much you could do for us, in helping us bring this war to an end.

  “You are, after all, something of a protégée of the Lord Regent, aren’t you?”

  Roslyn had nothing to say to any of that. She sat in silence as the fist of fear closed around her heart.

  “We are not your enemy, Lieutenant. The government you serve espouses the very values of the monsters who murdered tens of thousands to create Mages. Surely, you must see that it is only in the dissolution of the separate castes of Mages and mundane and the disruption of enforced monarchies that we will finally see the end of the Eugenicists’ horrific ideals and crimes.”

  He was so
earnest, so calm and concerned…but Roslyn knew what he’d done.

  “Tell me, Lord Protector, were you so determined to see the end of ‘horrific ideals and crimes’ when you ordered the murder of thousands of your own people’s children to fuel your war machine?”

  Solace shook his head at her and rose from his chair.

  “Sacrifices must be made,” he told her, his voice still warm and calm. “In time, I hope we can convince you of the truth of things. Until then, our security precautions will remain.”

  He bowed, a chubby little man with a warm voice and a heart of iron, and then he and his guards left Roslyn Chambers alone with her nightmare.

  34

  The apartment’s silence wore down on Roslyn after that. She remained on the couch, slowly curling into a fetal position as she struggled with her fears. She wasn’t even sure what to do with herself.

  Eventually, her fugue was interrupted by the sound of her next meal arriving. It took her a few minutes to force herself to unfold and eat the food. It wasn’t bad, but she had little enthusiasm for any of it.

  She found herself staring at the virtual window. Now that it was turned on, she could see that the screen had always been there, built in as part of the wall. The designers had done a good job of recessing it so that it vanished into the metal when turned off.

  If the window was actually showing the view from Styx, it would be…there. Roslyn found the thin arc of the accelerator ring beneath them. Studying the view through the window, it was definitely a feed of the gas giant they’d passed to reach Styx.

  Without the guards around her and with more time than she knew what to do with, Roslyn distracted herself by analyzing the various sparks of light. The window didn’t have the zoom commands it might have had outside of a cell, but it was clear enough for her to slowly begin to identify, if nothing else, larger and smaller ships.

  She could definitely tell the difference between gunships and capital ships, though the gunships were mostly also running fusion engines there. Presumably, standby wings were equipped with antimatter drives, but most of the production of that substance was clearly being used for missiles.

  Roslyn started counting. If she ever made it out of there, the knowledge of what was present in Chrysanthemum would be critical. On the other hand, the numbers she was counting up were terrifying.

  The Protectorate believed the Republic had started the war with between sixteen and twenty carrier groups, somewhere between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and fifty Promethean Interface–equipped warships.

  Between military defeats and desertion, intelligence said the Republic was down to six or seven carrier groups after the Battle of Nueva Bolivia, with two to four unaccounted for. They’d figured that was around sixty warships, maybe as many as seventy.

  Intelligence had confirmed the locations of five carriers and forty-three cruisers and battleships with some certainty, especially with the scouting missions by the Rhapsody-class ships.

  That meant they’d believed the Republic had a maximum of twenty or so ships left unaccounted-for…and Roslyn was counting almost seventy major starships in the region around Styx.

  For every ship she could see, there could easily be another one she couldn’t—though at least some of these ships had to be transports and freighters to support the logistics of an operation of this scale.

  There were shipyards visible as well. They were close enough to make out in some detail and she could see the shapes of dozens of the Republic’s cylindrical hulls taking form as well.

  This fleet couldn’t have been ready a few months earlier. Even a handful of those carrier groups could have turned the tide of many of the battles of the war so far—and yet there were more warships in this system than the Protectorate had believed their enemy had left.

  After taking a shower to try and wash off the last of the shock from meeting Lord Protector Solace—and the queasiness from just how personable the man turned out to be—Roslyn emerged to find that a set of books had been delivered to the room.

  Somehow, she was unsurprised to find that the paper books were a collection of histories and political treatises on the hundred-year-long Eugenicist Wars between Earth and Mars, and the formation of the Protectorate at the end of them.

  Even without opening them, she could guess the point of view they’d espouse. Boredom would drive her to read them sooner or later, she knew, but she needed to keep the reality in mind.

  No matter how much the Republic wanted to convert her to their point of view, they were the ones who’d ordered thousands murdered to fuel their fleets. They weren’t wrong in that the Protectorate inherently had some connections to the Eugenicists. The Mages had built structures in self-defense that resembled the castes their mad creators had imposed on Mars, but the intent mattered.

  Roslyn could even admit that the Protectorate was flawed and in need of reform—exactly the kind of reform, in fact, that she understood was being negotiated on Mars right then.

  None of that justified the Republic’s actions. The Secession would have been allowed to stand if the Republic hadn’t chosen war. They’d started the fight with the Protectorate in the end, rather than simply walk away.

  If Roslyn was where she thought she was, several systems had even lied about whether they were joining the Secession, using the Protectorate’s willingness to trust their members against them.

  That was a truth that needed to be exposed. The existence and location of the accelerator ring needed to be exposed. The RMN needed to know that the Republic had ships and shipyards no one was accounting for, concealed in systems the RMN regarded as friendly and safe.

  Somehow, Roslyn Chambers needed to escape. She had no idea how she was going to do that, but she needed to make it happen—and if at all possible, she needed to find Mage-Admiral Alexander and bring her out as well.

  Her only actual hope of getting out might hang on the Mage-Admiral’s power, anyway. Roslyn couldn’t fight off a fleet on her own.

  The Crown Princess of Mars? The Rune Wright, as ad Aaron had called her?

  Jane Alexander might just be able to fight a fleet herself.

  If she couldn’t, she and Roslyn might well be doomed.

  35

  The books turned out to be a much less effective conversion tool than Roslyn suspected Solace had hoped. Skimming through the abstracts to begin with, she was surprised how many of the writers recognized that so much of the Protectorate’s pro-Mage structure was born of fear.

  Some didn’t, but she left those on the bottom of the pile. The one boredom actually brought her to read was almost pro-monarchy in its level of neutrality, suggesting that the best answers were to find a balance between dealing with anti-Mage prejudices while slowly reforming the Covenant.

  The Covenant was what defined much of the rules that kept Mages a separate caste from the rest of humanity. It was under the Covenant that Mages had separate courts and Guilds, rules that called for Mages to be tried by Mages and similar protections.

  That had been the trade, after all. The Mages took the protection they felt they needed, including control of the Kingdom of Mars and the Protectorate the Mage-Kings had forged—and in exchange, they gave humanity the stars.

  Roslyn laid the book down and stared at the “window” on the wall blankly. The books were the only distraction she’d been given, and she could tell that they had been selected carefully. If she wasn’t careful, each book would make her more likely to buy into the spiel of the next one.

  It was an old trick, one she recognized, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work.

  In a convulsive moment, she swept the books off the table. She tried to kick the entire table over as she rose, but it was bolted to the floor. Only the lightweight chairs weren’t.

  After a moment’s thought, Roslyn kicked the table again, harder. The spike of pain up her leg was almost welcome, a distraction from the awful situation she was in.

  She paced over to the window and looked
out at the accelerator ring again. That flimsy-looking construction stretched for tens of thousands of kilometers, surrounding an entire world and producing enough antimatter to fuel a fleet.

  Roslyn could see the key to ending the war from her prison cell, and she had no way to communicate that with anyone.

  Someone knocked on her door, interrupting her thoughts, and she glared at the entryway. There was no real way for her to deny entry to anyone. Despite the comforts of her cell, it was a cell.

  Whoever was on the other side of the door waited a minute, knocked again, and then calmly entered the room. Roslyn glared at the familiar older man, but Colonel Othmar McLain simply shrugged at her.

  “If you do not answer, I’m still going to come in,” he told her gently. “I am mostly giving you a chance to make certain you are decent.”

  “What, you can’t check on the cameras to be sure?” she asked.

  “I could, but I choose to leave you some privacy,” McLain agreed amiably. “Republic policy says those cameras can only be regularly viewed by personnel of the same gender as the prisoner. We provide what securities we can.”

  “Am I supposed to be grateful?” Roslyn demanded.

  She should probably be more careful in how she addressed the man. Her best chance to find any way out of this mess probably involved befriending or seducing someone, and McLain was the first person to be alone with her in her cell so far.

  “No,” he allowed. “We are trying to make you comfortable, Lieutenant, but we must also see to our security.”

  Roslyn shook her head at him and dropped onto the couch, spreading her arms wide.

  “As you can see, I’m no threat to anyone’s security from this room,” she told him. “You might as well have me naked in chains on the main thoroughfare, for all I can impact your security.”

  She managed to surprise a choked snort of amusement from the Colonel.