A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10)

by Glynn Stewart

  The screen dissolved back into the crowned mountain before Roslyn could even question the involvement of the Mage-Queen. She stared blankly at the seal for several seconds before it faded into a split-screen view.

  Damien Montgomery was on the right side of the screen, his gloved hands resting on the big wooden desk in his office, the room she’d last seen him in. There were no babies or kittens in the room this time, but the Prince-Regent looked pleased with himself.

  Her Majesty, Kiera Alexander, Mage-Queen of Mars, occupied the left half of the screen. The petite redheaded monarch was wearing the last thing Roslyn had ever expected to see her Queen in: a dress. It was a slim-fitting white sheath dress that stretched well below the camera view, and the young Mage-Queen also wore a relieved expression.

  “Thank you,” Alexander stage-whispered. “I’m afraid I’ve been pulled away from the reception for the arrival of the new Legatan Senator. What a shame.”

  “Eva Abatangelo will be an important part of the new Senate,” Montgomery said gently. “The election should have been a year ago, but…better late than never.”

  “I like Eva,” Alexander countered. “I don’t like her head of staff, and the party was being barely tolerable. Besides, this is actually important.”

  “It is. Chambers, are you all right?” Montgomery asked Roslyn. “The last report we had from Mage-Captain Daalman said you were injured?”

  “Unconscious, not injured, I hope,” Roslyn corrected. “I took a dose of Exalt to protect the safe zone we’d established. I crashed afterward, exactly as expected.” She grimaced. “I don’t plan on repeating the experience.”

  “I’ve never taken it,” Montgomery admitted. “But I’m told it’s not a pleasant experience.”

  “Given the feeling of power from using the stuff, I imagine that’s intentional,” Roslyn admitted. Though it could also link to the fact that the medication was extremely dangerous—potentially lethal—for non-Mages.

  “Captain Daalman told us the situation was mostly resolved thanks to you,” Alexander noted. “I want your observations and assessment of the situation. Both as it unfolded and the final result.

  “You did, after all, bear my Voice through all of this,” the young Queen said calmly and firmly.

  “I had hoped not to use it,” Roslyn said quietly. “But the situation rapidly fell out of my control. I’ve never encountered anything like the Orpheus weapon before.”

  “No one in the Protectorate ever has,” Montgomery reminded her. “It represents a fusion of magic and technology that worries me. I had hoped that we could use the developments in magitech that Finley worked on to benefit humanity, not create new ways to violate and hurt people.”

  “Finley appears to have sourced some monsters for his service,” Roslyn agreed. She took a deep breath and considered the situation.

  “I think it’s best to start at the beginning and go through as much as I can,” she told them. “Our operation began when we located the apartment rented by Angus Killough and scouted it out…”

  The entire debrief took over an hour, and Roslyn felt completely wrung out when she finished.

  “The sequenced EMPs worked,” she told them. “We believe we have neutralized all active quantities of the Orpheus weapon on the surface of Sorprendidas. There are likely samples still stored in the lab that we will locate once the cyberwarfare team cracks open their security.”

  “Then you will give your final order as Voice to those teams,” Alexander said quietly. “Any samples of the Orpheus weapon are to be held safely until we have confirmed we can treat this post-Orpheus syndrome, and then completely destroyed.

  “I want nothing left of this monstrosity Ulla Lafrenz created,” the Mage-Queen told them. “We have no need of such a weapon, and I have no desire to see it in the hands of anyone who would threaten the Protectorate.”

  “We don’t have many enemies left,” Montgomery noted, “but the capacity to manufacture the Orpheus weapon would turn a small terrorist movement into a planetary-scale threat.”

  “I will make certain it is all destroyed,” Roslyn promised.

  “Good. There are more resources on their way to Sorprendidas as we speak,” the Prince-Regent told her. “Not just the warships Mage-Captain Daalman already summoned but humanitarian aid and industrial-support ships.

  “It will take time to rebuild Nueva Portugal. Sorprendidas could do it alone, but—”

  “No planet in my Protectorate is alone,” Alexander finished for her Regent. “The tone of the Cardinal-Governor’s request for assistance was such that I do not know if he truly believed he would get it.

  “He will. And more. Nueva Portugal will be rebuilt at the expense of the Protectorate,” the Queen concluded. “That will be made formal in the next few days, but you are welcome to share that with Governor Guerra as my representative.

  “As for yourself, Mage-Lieutenant Commander Chambers, you have been our Voice well and faithfully. Your mission appears done, and so your Warrant ends,” Alexander said formally. “I am beyond grateful for your service. Thousands live who might have died if I had sent another—or not sent a Voice at all.

  “What reward would a faithful servant ask of the Mountain?”

  Roslyn stared at the wallscreen in utter surprise.

  “My Queen, I…” She swallowed. “I did nothing for a reward. This was my duty as an officer of the Royal Martian Navy, as a bearer of the Warrant you gave me…as a Mage and as a human being. I did nothing I would not expect of another.”

  “Your expectations of your fellow officers and Mages, Lieutenant Commander, may be rather high,” Montgomery said drily. “Though they do align with mine.”

  “If you do not wish it, I won’t force adulation and award upon you,” Alexander told Roslyn—but there was a mischievous smile on the young monarch’s face.

  “I did my duty, nothing more,” Roslyn said.

  “You know the reward for a job well done is another job, yes?” Montgomery asked. “Your Warrant will expire once you have given the orders for the disposition of the Orpheus weapon, but your service will not be forgotten.”

  “I have a very short list of officers I know and trust, Lieutenant Commander,” the Mage-Queen of Mars said calmly. “It grows by the day, but you are on it, and believe me when I say you will likely regret that one day.”

  Alexander smiled.

  “For now, I believe we have exhausted you enough. Thank you, Roslyn Chambers, for honoring my Protectorate as I could expect far too few to do.”

  51

  The naval component of the cyberwarfare team working away in the Orpheus lab reported to Roslyn, which meant she was the one interrupted when Chief Trevis called up to the ship.

  Of course, what Trevis interrupted was Roslyn operating as air traffic controller, supporting the Sorprendidans’ efforts in Nueva Portugal. The destroyer’s sensors were notably better than those available to Sorprendidas’s people, so they were providing data and backup hands to the locals.

  It was the work of moments to pass her current workload over to Mage-Lieutenant Samuels, the officer of the watch.

  “Chief,” she greeted Trevis as she opened the video call. “I’ve been watching for your call. Any updates?”

  “Yes, sir,” the noncom said crisply. “We’ve found the medical files on post-Orpheus syndrome. With your permission, I’ll forward them to the locals immediately.”

  “Granted. Get those files over right now,” she ordered. “Hell, hang up on me if you need to.”

  Trevis chuckled.

  “I’d already passed them to the local cyber team for packaging and distribution,” he admitted. “They did a lot of the grunt work, but it was our people at the point. The software, the gear, everything here was the Republic’s best.

  “Better, even. I did some training sessions on what was supposed to be the Intelligence Directorate’s last generation of hardware and software,” he noted. “This stuff was better.”

  “
And you’re through?” she asked.

  “Yeah, but…”

  He trailed off, shrugging helplessly.

  “That doesn’t sound positive, Chief,” Roslyn said quietly.

  “We had a crack in the armor from the access logins you got from the security guard,” Trevis told her. “It still took us a while to get control of the system, and even then, there were high-security sections we didn’t have control of.

  “Once inside those sections, we were expecting to collide with more security and more encrypted files,” the noncom concluded. “Except…we didn’t.”

  “I don’t understand,” Roslyn said.

  “The files on post-Orpheus syndrome were right there, with the equivalent of a giant flashing neon sign pointing to them,” Trevis told her. “Someone had decrypted them and put them behind the security barriers in the first place we’d look.

  “Everything else is gone.”

  She blinked, taking a moment to be sure she understood what the Chief was saying.

  “The files were deleted?” she asked.

  “Copied, deleted, hashed and destroyed,” Trevis confirmed. “We have the post-Orpheus syndrome treatment records and experiments and the general records on the prisoners. Our less-secured files gave us a lot of logistical detail on the laboratory, but everything on the Orpheus weapon and the Orpheus Project itself were behind the high-security barriers.

  “All of that is gone.”

  Roslyn sighed grimly. They’d known someone had accessed Lafrenz’s computers, but they hadn’t had time to do that much.

  “When?” she asked.

  “It’s hard to say,” the noncom told her. “Definitely after we penetrated the facility, but…it honestly could have been anytime before we breached the final security layers. We’ll dig more, see if we can find anything, but I’m not hopeful.

  “The cleanup job was very thorough. The only reason we have the POS treatment data is because the person doing this wanted us to have it.”

  “Do we have enough to help?” she asked.

  “I only took a surface skim of the data myself, but it looked like Lafrenz had a detailed treatment plan, not just experimental data. I’m no doctor, sir, but I think it’s exactly what they need to help those people.

  “I think it’s more than we dared hope we had, even.”

  But the actual data on the weapon was gone. Worse, the data on the Orpheus Project and the people behind it was gone.

  “Are you certain the data was copied before it was destroyed?” Roslyn asked. “Someone took this with them?”

  “One hundred percent,” Trevis confirmed. “They were good, but we have full hardware access. I can tell that several petabytes of data were transferred out of the system from the console we suspect was used.”

  “Damn.” She shook her head. “That’s not what I was hoping to hear, Chief. Any other bad news?”

  “There was a fail-safe magnetic burn system installed on the sample-storage facility,” Trevis told her. “We couldn’t even find the damn storage until we broke the final security layer, but someone activated the fail-safe.

  “From the video I’m getting of the storage unit, they had samples of forty-six different iterations of the nanite. All have been destroyed.”

  “I can live with that, to be honest,” Roslyn admitted. “Our orders were to destroy any existing samples once we were certain we could treat the victims anyway.”

  “Can’t argue with the logic, sir,” Trevis said. “The test-subject records are bad enough.”

  “We’ll want to make sure the Guardia gets those, too,” she told him. “We can at least give the poor victims’ families some closure.”

  “I will, sir,” he promised. “What now, sir?”

  “Finish up down there,” Roslyn ordered. “Make sure you’ve cleaned out their main databases and that there aren’t any personal wrist-comps or datapads floating around. My understanding is that our tour of duty isn’t being adjusted, so we’ll be here for a while.

  “If we’ve got what we need to help the victims, the rush is over. Take the time to do it right.”

  Guerra, Daalman and Kristofferson looked disappointed but…unsurprised.

  “I was expecting these meshuggener to have set something up to destroy their data,” the XO said once Roslyn had completed her report.

  Huntress’s three officers were in Daalman’s office, with the Cardinal-Governor’s image taking up an entire wall as the old priest listened to them.

  “That someone has copied it is disturbing,” Guerra noted. “God will judge the people who built the weapon—Commander Chambers has seen to that—but I will admit I had prayed it would not leave my world.

  “I fear we are now too late to guarantee that.”

  “Unfortunately, Your Excellency, you are correct,” Roslyn told him. “With the level of chaos in Nueva Portugal and the wide options for exiting the Project Orpheus facility, we have no way of identifying who left the base with the data.

  “While there has been limited traffic off of Sorprendidas since then, there is no way we can do anything to prevent the data leaving the planet.”

  “Are we certain of that?” Guerra asked. “It seems that such a threat would justify significant searches of outgoing shuttles and vessels.”

  “It wouldn’t help,” Daalman admitted. “Between your local resources and the RMN ships arriving tomorrow and later, we could search every single ship leaving Sorprendidas. But we could dismantle them and still never find the data on a ship carrying it.

  “Hiding a data storage device is simply too easy. I’m tempted to make the effort regardless, Your Excellency, but I can see no value in it.”

  “God willing, it has fallen into the hands of someone who will destroy it,” Guerra said. “We believe they are also the one who made the post-Orpheus treatment plan easily found?”

  “We only have evidence of one person penetrating the facility other than us,” Roslyn agreed. “They were definitely a Mage and definitely hostile to both Orpheus and us. But they also clearly felt a moral responsibility to make sure that data was in our hands.

  “A moral responsibility I do not believe anyone from Project Orpheus would feel.”

  “They are demons, lost to the sight of God,” Guerra ground out. “I pray that His wisdom guides the Navy to them sooner rather than later.”

  “We will be watching,” Daalman promised. “The data and its thieves will not escape forever.”

  “So I pray.” Guerra sighed. “In all this disaster, your ship and your people—especially Commander Chambers—have been present and willing to help.

  “Thank you.”

  Unspoken was that the Cardinal-Governor probably didn’t think he’d have received the same level of help from the Republican Interstellar Navy—if the RIN had even had a ship in Sorprendidas.

  Even with the Promethean Interfaces and their murdered Mage brains, the RIN had never had enough ships to worry about local security.

  “That is the mission we were sent here to carry out,” Daalman told the Governor. “We are tasked with honoring Her Majesty’s Protectorate. You are under the protection of Mars. That means something more and greater than merely being part of a nation. It means that we—that someone from Mars—will be here when you need it.

  “That is Her Majesty’s oath, the promise that underlines everything that defines the nation we serve, Governor Guerra,” the Mage-Captain said. “Whatever you need, if we can provide it, we will.”

  “Thank you, Mage-Captain.” Guerra shook his head. “A few weeks ago, even, I would have regarded those as fancy words meant to soothe the raised hackles of former secessionists. Today… Today I recognize them as God’s own truth.

  “And I thank you.”

  The wallscreen dimmed to darkness and Daalman exhaled a long sigh.

  “I would love to believe that Project Orpheus was just this one lab,” he said quietly. “But the Red List exists and tells me that there are another dozen Mages out
there like Lafrenz.”

  “We’re going to have an ugly few years,” Kristofferson agreed. “But, as you told the Governor, Her Majesty will not leave those meshuggener be. We will hunt them down and we will make our people safe.”

  “From your lips to whoever’s listening,” Roslyn murmured. She wasn’t very religious, though the exposure to the Sorprendidans’ faith had been interesting.

  “Indeed. But speaking of Her Majesty,” Daalman said, “I have one more duty from her to discharge before we finish up this meeting. Chambers?”

  “Sir?” Roslyn said, straightening her back and facing her commanding officer.

  “Everything you did here was technically under your orders from Her Majesty as a Voice,” the Mage-Captain pointed out. “While you unquestionably rose above and beyond your duties as tactical officer of this ship, you operated entirely inside orders you had received.”

  “I did my duty, sir. Nothing more,” Roslyn agreed, as calmly as she could.

  “So I’m advised you told the Mage-Queen,” Daalman said with a chuckle. “Fortunately, neither she nor I nor the emergency promotion board she ordered convened agrees with you there.”

  The Mage-Captain slid a velvet jeweler’s box across the table.

  “This was a sufficient nightmare that I don’t know if there are going to be awards or medals out of it,” she told the younger woman. “But Her Majesty had some clear opinion that some recognition was due—and my own reports agreed with her.

  “Open it,” Daalman ordered.

  Roslyn obeyed. The golden pin inside wasn’t significantly different from the one she already wore at her collar. Many civilians might not even notice that the middle bar was thicker—but any Navy officer or spacer would.

  It wasn’t the insignia of a Royal Martian Navy Lieutenant Commander. It was the insignia of a full Commander.

  “Sir, I…”

  “Will not be even in the youngest ten officers ever promoted to Commander,” Daalman told her bluntly. “Somewhere around number seventeen, in fact—there were a lot of battlefield promotions going around at the start of the war.”