The Service of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  After all, if she read between the lines correctly, he was a politician.

  The tour began in the gardens, the last thing that Roslyn expected to find aboard what was supposedly a military station. Massive panels above her head created enough artificial light to support close to an acre of growing plants, with paths weaving through them that Gil happily led her along.

  “This was my people’s insistence,” he told her. “Every plant in here is edible. We bred them specifically to be both high-nutrition and attractive, allowing us to create multipurpose spaces like this.

  “Styx has multiple gardens like this, to help soothe the souls of the people who serve on her. She’s large enough to be able to spare the space, after all.”

  “She’s, what, three standard twenty-megaton hulls linked together?” Roslyn asked. That was why there was no natural light in the garden, after all. Styx wasn’t a rotating ring station that could have theoretically had some windows. The rotational gravity hulls used in Republic warships had zero-gravity transfer tubes at their centers, not a gap that would allow sunlight in.

  “Four, actually,” Gil told her. “Assembled into a pair of one-kilometer long sections connected together at the mid and end points. Each hull has separate rotational gravity, power and weapons, just in case something goes wrong.”

  “Like your secret base being found by the Protectorate,” she said sweetly.

  “That is unlikely to happen,” he replied, pulling a flower down to smell its fragrance. “We will be safe here from the Protectorate. For long enough, anyway.”

  “Because we’re in Chrysanthemum, which never officially seceded?” Roslyn asked, testing.

  The politician theory definitely won out. Roslyn was looking for it and the young man barely flinched before regaining his composure.

  “I can’t speak to that,” he told her virtuously. “We don’t want to give you all of the Republic’s secrets just yet. Come,” he instructed with a nod. “I’m not going to show you the entire station—I just explained how large she is—but we can take a look at a few spots. Anything in particular you’d want to see?”

  An escape route wasn’t something he was going to show her, Roslyn knew. Command centers, weapons, shuttle bays…those all fell into the same kind of category.

  “I’m a tactical officer by training, but you’re not going to show me the guns or control centers,” she said aloud. “I don’t know, life support?”

  He laughed.

  “There are a few things I can show you,” he told her. “Styx is as large as she is to permit her to also be a civilian station, Lieutenant. Come. Let me show you the promenade.”

  Either the hull that Roslyn was imprisoned in was the main civilian center aboard Styx, or there was a lot more civilian life aboard than Gil was implying. The promenade he took her to was basically a mall.

  She wasn’t allowed into the mall with its general civilian population, of course. Gil took her to a balcony that looked out over the promenade. The area stretched for several hundred meters in front of her, rows of shops organized into neat sections around decorative fountains and gardens—presumably part of the water- and food-supply systems like the larger garden Gil had shown her already.

  Roslyn’s rough count put the crowd in the mall at about six or seven hundred. Her study suggested that most of them were in uniform…and the ones that weren’t wore clothing that just screamed bureaucrat and politician.

  “So, where does what’s left of the Republic Assembly meet?” Roslyn asked after watching the crowd for a few minutes. “This is the continuity-of-government facility, isn’t it?”

  “The Lord Protector is here. What else matters?” Gil replied lightly. “The Assembly voted him full executive power for the duration. Once this war is over, we’ll make sure proper elections are held—both for us and the Protectorate.”

  “Because the Protectorate’s elections aren’t proper?” she said. “That seems a rather large assumption to make.”

  “No election made under a formal and imposed caste system can be regarded as free and fair,” Gil explained, as if she were a dim child. “So long as the Protectorate continues to uphold its fundamentally flawed system, no election held in their territory can be regarded as valid.”

  Roslyn held her tongue. The Protectorate Charter and the Covenant of Mars did give Mages certain rights and advantages others didn’t have—she wasn’t going to deny that—but she’d never heard of even one world where voting rights were remotely different for Mages.

  And both the Charter and the Covenant were being replaced with a new Constitution. The Protectorate had recognized its problems on its own, without needing the Republic to start a war to fix them.

  The fact that the Assembly seemed to have been completely shoved aside in favor of the Lord Protector didn’t exactly make the Republic look like a democracy to her, either.

  “Unless someone wants to give me a credit chip and loose me in those stores, I figure we’ve got as much as we’re going to get out of the promenade,” Roslyn finally told Gil. “You seem to have a plan, Mr. Gil, despite asking me for suggestions. Where to next?

  He smiled again. He had a nice smile. Shame it was attached to a prick.

  “I had some ideas,” he conceded, “but I am prepared to hear what you want to see.”

  “I want to see the accelerator ring,” Roslyn said. That was probably a risky ask, but she did want to see the accelerator ring—and to find out just what the Chrysanthemum native guiding her around thought of a project that must have consumed his entire star system for years.

  “All right,” Gil told her, pride in the accomplishment leaking through. “There’s an observation deck designed for just that. Are you all right in zero gravity, Lieutenant?”

  “I am an officer in the Royal Martian Navy, Mr. Gil,” Roslyn reminded him. Titles or not, he seemed to forget that. “I am entirely capable in zero gravity, yes.”

  “She means she can snap you like a twig in zero-gee, given a single handhold,” the guard beside her muttered. Roslyn wasn’t sure she was supposed to hear that—but she was quite sure Gil hadn’t heard it. Or been supposed to.

  It seemed she wasn’t the only one who found him an annoying-but-pretty prick.

  39

  Roslyn and Gil might have been pushing off and drifting through the zero-gravity portion of Styx, but her two guards had turned on magnetic boots as the transfer pods delivered them to the exterior hull.

  In theory, Roslyn had an opportunity in that. She could, without much difficulty, move much faster than the guards could. On the other hand, she couldn’t outspeed SmartDarts or bullets. She was quite sure her guards would choose to shoot her over letting her escape.

  Plus, she was curious as to just what she was going to be shown. The microgravity part of the station looked similar to where she’d been brought aboard, which helped her close part of the loop on her mental map. It wasn’t a full closed loop, not with the fact that the transport pods could go to any number of stations on the exterior hull, but it was a start.

  Instead of heading into what she was reasonably sure was a shuttle bay, if not the one she’d arrived through, Gil led her along the hull and into an unexpected open space. At some point, this had probably been slated for the delivery of a weapon of some kind.

  Instead of that weapon, it had received massive transparent-aluminum panels and opened out into deep space. Control panels on those windows allowed visitors to apply zoom factors and look more closely at whatever caught their eye.

  Roslyn drifted out to the window and stopped herself next to one of the control panels, looking out at the massive construct of the accelerator ring. From there, she could see other stations wrapped around it.

  A tap on the controls zoomed in on what turned out to be shipyards. Row upon row of refit yards—each of them holding a Republic warship. She counted dozens of ships in orbit, and there were probably half as many as that here.

  “We built all of this in five yea
rs,” Gil murmured. “Legatus sent us engineers, schematics, money…but we still did in five years what took them forty. A million workers have been out here for half a decade.”

  “Those ships are still under construction?” Roslyn asked. “There’s an entire fleet out there.”

  “Only some of them were built here,” he admitted. “We’ve only had yards capable of building starships for about a year. They were used for ring segments prior to that and proved easy to repurpose once we had the ring itself complete.

  “The ring’s only been online for six months. We barely managed to get it running before Legatus fell…but we did.” Gil waved his hand at the window.

  “The Protectorate surprised us with a secret fleet, with the dreadnoughts and the new missiles,” he admitted. “But soon…soon, we’ll return the favor. This was in motion before, to make sure we had a second string to our bow.”

  Roslyn barely kept herself from nodding. If this fleet had joined the first waves, the Republic would have carried the war by sheer numbers and surprise. Instead, they’d only had the fleet they’d brought to the fight—a fleet that might have been enough if the Protectorate’s system militias hadn’t rallied to Montgomery’s call and the dreadnoughts hadn’t already been under construction in the shadows.

  “But the yards are online now. We’ve only built a dozen ships ourselves, but the yards have been busy with refits,” he said proudly. “We received one of only a handful of Prometheus Interface manufactories and installation facilities. These ships were built elsewhere, delivered here by larger transports, but it falls to us to make them true starships.”

  A chill ran down Roslyn’s spine and she forced herself to silence. It was pointless to challenge these people over the Prometheus Interface and its costs. Wasn’t it?

  “So, these ships aren’t actually starships yet?” she asked.

  “They are becoming starships,” Gil said slowly, realizing he might have said more than he should. “We will be ready soon to deploy the second wave, to drive your invasion fleet back and rescue our worlds from the boots of Martian conquerors. This war is far from as over, as your people seem to assume.”

  “Despite half your fleet deserting or defecting?” Roslyn demanded, her anger getting the better of her. “You lose a fleet built by murder and murder more people to build another one? Where did these Mages come from, Gil? Were these your children or the ones your fleet kidnapped from Protectorate worlds?”

  It was probably a good thing she was Mage-cuffed. It was taking every scrap of self-control she had to keep herself from lunging at the prick. If she’d had her magic, he would have been dead where he stood.

  “Do you even understand just what your fucking starships entail?” she snarled.

  “I understand the propaganda and lies the Protectorate spreads about the martyrs of the Prometheus Program, yes,” Gil said stiffly. “You claim they are fueled by children and Mages, and I assure you, all of that is lies. Your Montgomery put together a neat piece of deception, one that worked on fools, but we are not deceived anymore.”

  “Really,” Roslyn said. “Really. Lies. I’ve met Damien Montgomery, Alecto Gil. The man doesn’t know how to lie. He doesn’t know how to fake anger. If you trust George Solace over Damien Montgomery, you are the blind fool.

  “And you have chosen death and hatred over your humanity.”

  The observation deck was silent.

  “I think we’re done here,” Gil ground out. “If you will not listen, I will not be propagandized to.”

  “One of us is deaf and blind,” she told him. “And I don’t think it’s the one of us who was kidnapped and imprisoned.”

  “Guards, take her back to her cell,” the aide snapped. “This little excursion is over.”

  Roslyn considered resisting as the guards approached her with the chains for her Mage-cuffs, but there was no point. She’d just tried to push every button she could find on Alecto Gil—and she’d learned a few interesting things along the way.

  The Republic had to have an answer to the accusations leveled at them, and it seemed their chosen one was that the brains in the Prometheus Interface were volunteers and non-Mages. It wouldn’t hold up forever—it couldn’t, not if the Republic wanted to keep building ships—but it might last until they’d launched this new fleet at the Protectorate’s throat.

  She stared at the yards and ships as her guards chained her hands and wrists together, until they attached the lead to the chain between her wrists and pulled her after them. Floating in zero gravity, she had no way to resist.

  Gil stayed in the observation deck as the guards pulled her away, leaving her alone with the two women responsible for keeping her contained.

  “You going to give us trouble?” the older guard asked as they reached the transit pod.

  “What’s the point?” she replied. “Let’s go.”

  “Smart kid,” her escort replied.

  The pod delivered them to an unfamiliar set of corridors. Her escorts clearly had maps in their implants that they were following. Roslyn kept track of the walls around her, hoping to link it up with her mental map sooner or later.

  Their route took them through a less public-facing part of the station, with far more utilitarian sections. Open spaces stretched around them, with large sectors containing piping and cables, and boxes and tubes suggesting the rooms and corridors she was used to seeing.

  They were in the maintenance sections of the station. Given Styx’s scale, the builders had clearly just left a two-meter-high empty gap between each floor, giving them open space above and around most of the usual working spaces of the ship to fix and repair systems as needed.

  Her guards were clearly taking the fastest route possible, dragging her up stairs, over corridors and ducking under cabling and piping. If Roslyn wasn’t fast enough to keep up and pay attention, she was going to crack her head on something.

  That meant she almost missed the “box” covered in silver inlay. It took a moment to place the set of three rooms from the outside, but she realized she was looking at an apartment warded against magic. Unlike most of the other rooms she could see from the maintenance space, which were linked together in rows of twelve at least, this one stood alone with three meters of space on all sides.

  As they passed by, Roslyn tried to study the exterior of what was either her space or a near-duplicate as closely as she could. It was a later addition, she realized, added into a space that had been left empty for future upgrades.

  And as a later addition, it hadn’t been welded into place with the big machinery that put ships together. Some of the corner welds looked almost spotty…

  She was yanked forward by her guards, hard, as she realized she’d slowed.

  “Keep moving,” the woman barked. “We’re not giving you a fucking tour.”

  Roslyn trotted forward obediently. She might have learned what she needed to. The only question now was if she was strong enough for what she needed to do—and if the room she’d just seen was her room…or Alexander’s.

  They entered normal corridors shortly afterward, her guards leading Roslyn back to her room. That was in the wrong direction for it to be the one she’d seen, and she went along, linking bits of her mental map together as best as she could on the run.

  Finally, the guards took her inside and pulled off the cuffs.

  “I’d shower after having Gil slobber all over me for an hour,” one of the guards observed drily. “Just don’t cause trouble.”

  The door slammed shut behind Roslyn, leaving her trapped in a space that prevented her use of magic. Trapped in a box she’d seen the outside of…and with a mental map she had to put together as best as she could.

  She dropped to the floor, pulling the books and treatises to her and trying to reassemble her mental map in a somewhat three-dimensional shape.

  If the room she’d seen was Alexander’s, then it was almost certainly here, barely twenty meters away. The route she’d been taken along to get back fr
om the transfer pod led through the maintenance voids here. Depending on whether she could give the pod a destination, it could at least theoretically link up to the shuttle bay and deliver them to a spacecraft.

  Roslyn was confident that she could fly anything. That was part of her training, after all. Unlocking a Republic spacecraft and getting clear of the station, though…that would be harder.

  Unless she made someone do it for her. The Republican personnel responsible for running the situation had to be terrified of Mages. They’d spent so much effort trying to keep her contained and restricted from her power that the thought of a fully unleashed Mage would probably make most of them crap themselves.

  She could force someone to get her off the station. She knew how to get to Alexander’s quarters. The guards had been half-annoyed by Gil, half-aggravated by Roslyn’s own prodding on the Prometheus Project, but their rush had been their undoing.

  If she could escape.

  If.

  If the corner of her bathroom wall was as weak as it looked like the corner of Alexander’s was…there might be a chance.

  If she was strong enough.

  40

  Before she did anything else, Roslyn spread out the books on the floor again. Positioning herself between the camera and the map she was assembling, she hoped that it looked like pure chaos to the observers. Just a bored prisoner entertaining herself.

  The map was promising. The guards should never have brought her back on the direct route through the maintenance tunnels—they had clearly been twitchy over the tours and requests she was being granted, and her attempt to hammer Gil’s buttons had rattled them.

  They’d rushed and they’d revealed her way out. She moved books together, linking the two apartments—hers and Alexander’s. If she could avoid her own guards, the first place she’d face opposition would be when she reached Alexander’s cell and faced the Admiral’s guards.