Sword of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “Was it the same on Legatus?” he asked Niska.

  The Augment sighed.

  “A bit,” he admitted. “But not like this. Legatus runs the Republic; the news leaks out even if people aren’t supposed to talk about it. The Link—that FTL com you mentioned—is classified. None of the news from it should be getting out to the public, but it does.”

  “And here it isn’t,” O’Malley agreed. “And Manchester doesn’t seem to be thinking they’re benefiting from the Republic—or the war.”

  When the three men looked at her, she shrugged and grinned.

  “Boys,” she said calmly. “I went and got a manicure and a haircut, then went shopping. It’s amazing how much information you can get out of bored personal-service and retail workers.”

  “Okay, so what did you learn?” Niska asked.

  “Nobody here really agrees with the war,” O’Malley told them. “Most of the people I talked to? They don’t understand why it’s happening. There doesn’t even seem to be a solid propaganda effort to bring them onside, which is damn weird.”

  “There should be,” the LMID agent noted. “Most likely, there was. But everyone is putting on a good face, so it’s at least partially lapsed. It’s weird.”

  “Everyone is being very careful what they say until they’ve got a solid feel on you,” Damien said quietly. “Which makes me wonder if we should be looking around corners for secret police.”

  The hotel room was silent.

  “In theory, something like that would be against the Republic’s constitution,” Niska pointed out. “On the other hand, there are exemptions for times of war.”

  “There had to be more reason than that for the war,” O’Malley said. “I thought it was about the ban on Mages coming to the Republic.”

  “But if we have a technological jump solution, why would we care?” Niska asked. “It’s harder to see on Legatus, I think. People there bought into the us-versus-them narrative long ago. There’s no one questioning the war.”

  “But here…Manchester was always an UnArcana World but never really hostile to the Protectorate,” O’Malley said with a sigh. “They just followed Legatus into the Secession and now into the war.”

  “And make no mistake, the Republic is in charge here,” Damien told them. “I’d bet a good chunk of change that everything that hits the news is being approved in advance.”

  “That’s illegal,” O’Malley objected.

  “Except in times of war,” Niska repeated. “Our Republic is breaking more rules than one.”

  He sighed, rising from the chair and crossing to the window. From there, he could see the mountains, and the cyborg seemed to be searching for answers somewhere in those distant blue rocks.

  “I’m realizing how much of a blind eye I was turning to things I should have been paying attention to,” he said quietly. “LMID was running counterintelligence, but the new RID was still operating on Legatus, cutting corners and butting heads.

  “They were supposed to be an external entity, but their agents seemed to be everywhere.” Niska shook his head. “At some point, they turned into secret police as well, and I didn’t notice. Because that was illegal.”

  He was intentionally echoing O’Malley’s words.

  “It’s not the only change I missed. Even before I got the Prodigal Son order, the excuses for not holding elections for the representatives in the Republic Assembly were starting to get thinner and thinner. The Lord Protectorship was supposed to be a temporary role, to be replaced by an elected President within a few years…”

  “Let me guess,” Damien said softly. “Except in times of war.”

  “Exactly. There was a setup in the constitution to temporarily convert the Presidency back to a Lord Protectorship to guarantee continuous leadership during war. I wonder, now, if we’ll ever see an elected President before Solace dies.”

  The room was silent. None of this was really counter to Damien’s expectations of the Republic, but he knew he was looking at anything the secessionary state did with a strong layer of cynicism.

  O’Malley and Niska had helped the Republic be born. Damien didn’t think either had been involved in any of the really bloody parts of the covert war, but they’d certainly provided logistics for it all, if nothing else.

  “Does this impact our mission?” Damien finally asked. “Given what we know happened to Ricket, are we really surprised that the Republic is getting more tainted by the minute?”

  Niska snorted.

  “Easy enough for you to swallow the Republic’s failings,” he said. “Harder for us.” He was still looking out at the mountains.

  “Related, though, is that while the government here on Manchester still seems to be playing by the rules, the RID is here in the shadows…and the government is getting much more secretive, too.”

  “Stuff they’re not talking about, bases nobody admits to, units of the planetary military that aren’t in the records anymore? That kind of thing?” Romanov asked.

  “All of that and more,” Niska confirmed. “Most relevant to us is that the New Blackstone Edge is now a military reservation.”

  Damien rolled that around in his mind for a moment.

  “That’s where the school is, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “Exactly. The school, a planetary park, half a dozen mid- and high-tier resorts…all shut down eighteen months ago to become a reservation for the Arsenault Guard. Handed over to the Republic Army ten months ago.”

  The Guard continued to survive as the local militia of the system, though Damien understood that all of their spaceborne assets had been handed over to the Republic government. It made sense that the Republic Army also had facilities on the Republic’s planets. They needed recruiting and training centers, if nothing else.

  “So, the school is now sealed to the public?” he asked.

  “The Manchester Planetary Thaumaturgy Academy is now in the middle of a thousand square kilometers of mountains and foothills closed to anyone who isn’t part of the Republic Military,” Niska agreed.

  “When I was trying to book tickets at one of the resorts—something that may have drawn attention, even though it makes sense for crew of a jump ship that hasn’t been here since the area was closed off—I talked to a few of the folks at the travel agency.

  “They specialize in hikers and skiers, and they were very clear in their warnings,” he concluded. “They knew a few people who’d gone too close and been escorted out—and while they talked around the possibility, it sounds like they know of at least one person the RA shot dead for violating the reservation’s boundaries.”

  “That seems rather…severe,” Romanov noted. “I could see using lethal force to protect specific facilities inside the reservation, but the entire point of a secured zone is to give you space to find and catch people before they get to the point where you’re shooting.”

  “It depends,” Niska said grimly. “If you’re also using the reservation as, say, a training ground for a new corps of elite Augment commandos… it might be useful to have them kill people who stray into the reservation.

  “As practice.”

  The hotel was sturdily built, but it was not up to resisting the angry fist of a fully functioning cyborg. Niska’s fist slammed at least three inches into the concrete, and the room was suddenly very silent again.

  “I spent my life working toward this,” he snarled. “I gave Legatus my body—literally. I gave them my soul, my entire adult career. I let them carve out pieces of me and replace them with machines.

  “It was supposed to be better. We were supposed to be better. Not in the sense of faster, stronger, but in terms of morals, of equality. We were supposed to be on the right side of history.”

  “And now?” Damien asked.

  “If they killed even one child, then everything I fought for was a lie,” James Niska said quietly. “If they are murdering people to train new commandos that will kill without hesitation, without question, then everything I buil
t has been thrown away.”

  “There are a thousand ways to train soldiers without needing that,” O’Malley argued. “The people who died could have simply got too deep, into areas they shouldn’t have. Areas where they assumed anyone present was a Protectorate spy.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  Niska’s response wasn’t a question. It was a simple statement of fact.

  “If enough people died that the travel agency isn’t just aware of the rumors but is trying to warn people about the possibility, it isn’t that simple,” he continued.

  “But right now, what matters is that we’re not going to be able to just drive up to a few kilometers away from the Academy and hike the rest of the way. We need a new plan.”

  Damien sighed, thinking as he crossed over to where Niska had broken the wall. Giving the cyborg a long, mostly sympathetic look, he waved an injured hand over the hole.

  Power flared in the room as the shattered concrete lifted back into place. Some of it cloned itself to fill the gaps where his magic couldn’t find the debris. A few seconds with Damien’s gloved hand above where Niska had punched the wall, and there was no sign the cyborg had ever damaged the wall.

  “Augments renting hotel rooms in secret aren’t any better than Mages, in terms of catching attention,” he murmured.

  “I can’t teleport us in. Not without a lot more information than we have. Can we go in on the ground still? By foot?”

  “I checked the map,” Niska admitted. “The Academy is right in the center of the new reservation. Forty kilometers from the nearest edge. We could get an off-road vehicle and get to the perimeter, but as soon as we cross the perimeter with any kind of vehicle, we’d trigger an alert.

  “I’m not even sure we could get across the perimeter on foot.”

  “Assuming most of the interior isn’t wired, Romanov and I can arrange that,” Damien replied. “But that still leaves us forty kilometers to travel on foot. In the mountains, so I can’t imagine the path would be perfectly straight.”

  “With air and ground patrols out looking for us,” O’Malley added. “I don’t know if we can sneak our way through forty kilometers of secured mountain—and then back out.”

  “What about by air?” Romanov asked.

  “It’s a no-fly zone up to about twenty kilometers,” Niska replied. “Suborbital flights will go over it, but anything we could land or jump from would draw suspicion.”

  “Oh, ye of little of faith,” the Marine replied with a grin. “So, there will be flights going over the site? How high?”

  “I’ll have to check. What are you thinking?” Niska asked.

  “I’m many things, Niska, but I am first and foremost a Martian Marine.” Romanov’s grin widened. “Do you mean the Augment Corps never trains to drop from orbit?”

  14

  Twelve hours later, they reconvened in Niska’s hotel room. There was a lot less free space in the room now, with assorted boxes filling every corner.

  “We brought a bunch of stuff down from orbit, and I bought things that shouldn’t have attracted too much attention here,” Romanov noted as he gestured around at the boxes. “For all of that, if anyone puts the pieces together, they’ll get suspicious fast.

  “Assuming the RID’s internal group is better than our people, we still have at least twenty-four to forty-eight hours to launch this, but after that, we’re probably going to be seeing Augments knocking on our doors,” the Marine admitted.

  “And what, exactly, do we do if it turns out that I can’t get us onto anything flying over the reservation before that?” Niska asked.

  “We start moving around,” Romanov replied. “I’m paying cash and using different faces, so while I suspect RID can find us, every wrench we throw at them slows the process down.”

  The Augment spy snorted.

  “Fortunately for you, I managed to find a suborbital flight to Grand Leeds that doesn’t quite go over the reservation but can be adjusted easily enough,” he noted. “They go over at sixty kilometers. I’m presuming you’ve got the proper gear for prebreathing for this stunt?”

  “What I didn’t have on Starlight I found down here,” Romanov confirmed. “We’ll need to prebreathe for forty-five minutes, but the equipment I’ve got will handle adjusting pressures as we drop.”

  “How far are we falling here?” Damien asked carefully.

  “Sixty kilometers,” Niska repeated instantly. “Straight down. It’s not going to be a fast process, but they won’t see us coming.”

  “The HALO gear I grabbed is automatic,” Romanov told Damien. “You don’t have to do anything other than hold on, my lord.”

  “That’s not particularly reassuring,” the Hand replied. He could teleport himself to safety if things went wrong, he supposed, so there was only so much to worry about.

  “But it sounds like the best plan,” he conceded. “How much can we trust the crew of this transport, Niska?”

  “Not at all,” the spy admitted. “An LMID badge and a pile of money answers a lot of questions, but we’ll be going aboard as cargo and need to override the doors to jump.”

  “That’s risky,” Romanov said. “Our jump window is less than ten seconds long.”

  “So, we override the doors in advance,” O’Malley argued. “We’ve got five minutes in the air before we need to jump, and as soon as the plane is off the ground, we can get to work.

  “I like it better than playing hide-and-go-murder with RID hunter-killer teams, that’s for sure.”

  “It’s not a bad plan,” Damien allowed. “It’s just a terrifying one.” He looked around the other three people in the room. “I’m guessing I’m the only one of us who’s never jumped out of a perfectly good spaceship before?”

  The Augments chuckled.

  “I don’t know about spaceship,” Niska admitted. “I’ve HALO-jumped before, but not from sixty kilometers. We train for forty at most.”

  “Martian Marines train to drop from orbit,” Romanov replied. “Of course, we use magic to protect the troops down to about forty kilometers from the ground, which does make life easier.”

  “They’re not going to see this coming,” Niska said. “But I suspect they’ve got some kind of security at the Academy still. We’ve worked out how we get in…but how are we getting out?”

  “I’ve looked at the maps,” Damien replied. “I’ll have sightline from the Academy to outside the reservation. Your high-tech solution will get us in. My magic will get us out.”

  Niska looked uncomfortable but nodded.

  “I don’t like it, but I’ll admit I was hoping that was an option. Are we good?”

  The suborbital transport plane was a massive affair, with a wingspan of at least a hundred meters. It was a delta shape, with most of its body acting as both lifting surface and fuel tank.

  There was no visible difference between the cargo container or passenger compartment and the rest of the transport. The aircraft used the same engines as a surface-to-orbit shuttle and made more use of lifting surfaces to save fuel.

  Its power-to-mass ratio was lower than a shuttle’s, though. It could still carry the ten thousand–plus tons of cargo a heavy-lift shuttle lifted, though it never truly left the gravity well of a planet.

  “This way,” Niska told them. The Augment led the four over to a cargo-loading truck that was idling near the big aircraft. There was a cargo container, far smaller than the big ones mounted on Starlight in orbit, with one end open.

  The driver was studiously ignoring them as he warmed his hands around a paper cup of some hot beverage. Despite that ignoring, however, the drink was put aside moments after they were aboard, and the cargo container closed behind him.

  “I hope that was one good cup of coffee,” Niska bitched under his breath. “That driver alone cost us a hundred thousand pounds.”

  Damien still had to mentally pause whenever he heard the name of the Republic’s new currency. The entire Protectorate had operated on the Martian d
ollar for centuries. Local currencies existed, but interplanetary trade was in dollars.

  The Republic, of course, couldn’t use Martian dollars. They’d refused to even use the same currency name. So, the Pound Reliant of the Republic of Faith and Reason had been born.

  A hundred thousand pounds was about seventy thousand Martian dollars…which was probably about a third again that driver’s annual salary.

  “Cheap at the price,” he murmured as the container slid into the plane’s cargo bay. “Prebreathing?”

  Romanov was already unpacking the pressure suits and air supplies.

  “You need to get the nitrogen out of your blood or you’re going to have the bends on fucking steroids,” the Marine told him. “Get the mask on first, then we’ll get the rest of the suit on around it.”

  Damien obeyed, locking the breath mask over his mouth and nose and slinging the oxygen tank over his shoulder. The pure oxygen hit his system like a shot of caffeine, but he carefully kept his breaths controlled as the various pieces of the pressure suits came out.

  They couldn’t drop from sixty kilometers without protective gear. Everything they were currently setting up was contained in the combat exosuits Martian Marines would pull this stunt in, but there was no way they could have smuggled military-grade battle armor onto the surface.

  Skydiving gear it was, and Damien had no clue what he was doing.

  The other three assembled their own gear, and then Romanov set to helping a suit get assembled around Damien.

  Having someone else dress him felt damn weird, but it wasn’t like his hands worked properly. Even if Damien knew what he was doing, he couldn’t have handled most of the catches without using magic.

  And the last thing he wanted was for a seal to fail when he was thirty or forty kilometers above breathable air!

  “Airborne,” O’Malley reported. The Augment was linked into the transport’s systems, but even Damien had felt the engines flare to life.