Sword of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “The clock is ticking,” she continued. “We jump in five minutes, thirty-five seconds from…mark.”

  “Go,” Niska ordered. “Let’s get this container op—”

  Damien was sick of feeling helpless. A gesture cut the chains and bolts holding the container closed with a miniscule blade of force.

  “Let them figure that out,” he told the others. “We don’t have time. Five minutes.”

  O’Malley snorted and shoved the door open. Their container was one of several in the cavernous void of the transport’s belly, but they were at least on the bottom level.

  They were still low enough that gravity felt the same as normal, but Damien knew that would change as they got higher.

  “Are we expecting security in here?” he asked.

  They were all carrying stunguns, short-ranged carbines that fired electric SmartDarts, but he hadn’t been expecting to use them aboard the plane.

  “Once the bay is sealed, it’s left alone,” Niska replied as they followed O’Malley through the narrow gaps between the containers. “This section isn’t even pressurized. By the time the bird reaches full altitude, it’s near-vacuum in here.”

  Their suits would protect them from that, but that didn’t sound particularly fun either way.

  “We need to get out of here,” Damien said.

  “Four minutes, thirty seconds,” O’Malley replied absently as they reached the loading doors. “These doors may not be actively pressurized, but they are designed to not do what we want them to.

  “Let’s hope that’s enough time.”

  She was removing a panel next to the door as she spoke, pulling wires out and connecting them to her wrist-comp.

  “Do a final check on the suits and the parachutes,” Damien ordered Romanov quietly. “Everybody’s. We can’t afford to have a damn accident at terminal velocity.”

  His math said that it was going to be a fifteen-minute fall before they activated the parachutes. That was a lot of time to know you were going to die if something went wrong.

  On the other hand, if they knew something was going wrong, Damien could probably still get them safely to the ground. He wasn’t sure he could do so subtly, however—and he’d be shocked if the RID didn’t have scanners in orbit looking for the distinctive heat bloom of powerful magic.

  There wasn’t much a Mage could do that would create that bloom, but the Republic was going to want to know if anyone was doing magic on that scale.

  “Suits are good,” Romanov murmured over the radios. “Sixty seconds to the jump window.”

  The door was still closed and O’Malley was still working.

  “What kind of paranoid fuckwad puts this level of security on the doors of a plane in flight?” O’Malley demanded. “I’m close. What’s the backup plan?”

  “We tear the doors open,” Damien told her. “That won’t go unnoticed.”

  “Fuck.” The Augment was silent again and Damien added a timer to his own heads-up display.

  With a ten-second window, they couldn’t risk not getting out. He would tear the doors open if necessary, but without anything to close them afterward, that would force a detour of the plane.

  And that would draw attention they couldn’t afford. That would give the defenders fifteen minutes to scramble to intercept them. Best case, it meant they had fifteen minutes less to search the Academy.

  Worst case, they got shot down before they hit the ground.

  “In! I’m in!” O’Malley snapped. “Doors opening in fifteen, closing in twenty from…now.”

  That wasn’t much time at all, but they were ready. Taking a hard breath of the oxygen feeding through his mask, Damien stepped up to the doors.

  Then, as the metal swung open, he closed his eyes and stepped out into the void.

  Sixty kilometers was a long way down. Intellectually, he’d known that. Hell, Damien had flown shuttles from surface to orbit; he knew what a planet looked like from sixty kilometers up.

  There was something very different to seeing it with nothing beneath him. Then he started as the limbs of his pressure suit moved, dragging his arms and legs with them.

  “Landing zone should be flagged on your HUD,” Romanov’s voice told him. “I have remote control of your suit and it’s mirroring my drop. Just…relax.”

  “It’s a long way down.”

  “Fifteen minutes still,” Romanov replied.

  Above them, the suborbital transport was already a shrinking dot. At this height, terminal velocity was noticeably faster.

  “So, what do we do if they have antimissile lasers and decide we’re a threat?” Damien asked.

  “Well, unless you or I realize in time to do something, we die,” the Marine replied calmly. “Most likely, though, we’ll pass relatively unnoticed. We are very small targets right now.”

  “Very small, very high, very fragile,” the Hand agreed, looking down again and seeing the gold star marking their destination. Still over fifty thousand meters beneath him.

  His suit adjusted again, angling his body slightly to bring him toward that star.

  “Bingo. The poor fuckers on the ground will never know what hit them.”

  An alert popped up on Damien’s suit visor.

  “I’m getting an overheat warning,” he told Romanov, realizing that he was starting to sweat as well.

  “We’re too high to dissipate your body heat and what friction we are getting,” the Marine confirmed. “The suits aren’t rated for this, so the software will complain.”

  “What do you mean, the suits aren’t rated for this?” Damien demanded. He’d assumed Romanov knew what he was doing.

  “Relax,” his bodyguard ordered. “They’re Marine Corps gear; they’re built with a fifty percent safety margin. We’ll be fine.”

  Romanov paused thoughtfully.

  “I mean, the suits won’t be reusable,” he added after a moment. “We’re burning through layers that are supposed to be used again, but we’ll be fine.”

  Damien swallowed his response to that and started paying more attention to what was going on. If things starting going badly, it would probably take his magic to fix things. Denis Romanov was a Marine Combat Mage, a powerful and trained magical warrior…but Damien Montgomery was a Hand and a Rune Wright.

  Seconds turned to minutes and horror turned to boredom. The warning lights faded, though several of the icons that stayed told Damien that Romanov was correct in his assessment—they’d survived the excess heat by permanently damaging the suits.

  He had enough control to check the parachute status, though, and that looked fine.

  They plummeted past five kilometers and he swallowed as the mountains began to grow beneath him. The ground was starting to look very spiky.

  “How low do we go before we open the chutes?” he asked.

  “Our terminal velocity is fifty-five meters per second,” Romanov replied. “We pop the chutes at roughly twelve seconds’ altitude, so around seven hundred meters.

  “At that point, it should take us about forty-five seconds to land. It’s going to be rough.”

  Damien considered.

  “Are we talking stopping a nuke with magic rough or teleporting a space station with magic rough?” he asked. He’d done both of those. One had knocked him unconscious for days. The other had done that and wrecked his hands.

  Romanov took a second to stop laughing before he replied.

  “Not that bad. Crashing a shuttle rough. Pretty sure you’ve done that.”

  Damien sighed.

  “That’s still not a recommendation,” he noted. “I’ve done a lot of things I wouldn’t care to repeat.”

  “In all honesty, my lord? I made one orbital drop, with four Mages providing safety protection for the company. This whole stunt was already on my list of things I wouldn’t care to repeat.”

  “Why did no one say things like that before we jumped out of the plane?” Damien asked.

  “Because I’m not sure Niska or O’Mall
ey would have made the jump if I’d told them that, let alone you,” Romanov admitted. “Fifteen hundred meters, my lord. Chutes in twenty.”

  Damien inhaled and braced himself.

  He was expecting a full-body horse kick…and he underestimated it badly. He’d been knocked unconscious during the shuttle crash he’d survived, and it still paled in comparison to the first moment of the chute deploying.

  It calmed down after that, though, and he managed to regain his breath as the computers in his suit neatly guided him to the center of the snow-covered courtyard of the Manchester Planetary Thaumaturgy Academy.

  15

  The first thing Damien noticed about the Academy was the silence and the snow. It was late enough in the autumn that snow wasn’t unexpected, but it hadn’t been cleared. There were no footprints. Several inches of untouched snow had drifted over the entire compound.

  “How many students are supposed to be here?” he asked Niska as they disconnected their air supplies. The pressure suits would double as body armor and cold-weather gear, but they didn’t need oxygen at this point.

  “Two hundred or so,” the Augment replied, looking around the buildings. “Two dorms, over there. Two classroom buildings, there. One administration building.”

  Five buildings and a hangar.

  “No heat signatures,” O’Malley noted. “There’s nobody here except us. This place is abandoned.”

  “It’s not supposed to be,” Niska said grimly. “I suggest we stay in pairs and check the place out. Admin building?”

  “You and O’Malley take the hangar,” Damien ordered. “There may be a way out tucked away in there still. Romanov and I will take the admin building.”

  Something about the frozen school grounds in the middle of the mountains was reminding him that Niska was a Legatan agent. The cyborg had been their enemy for a long time—and part of his job had been dealing with rogue Mages on Legatus.

  He’d trusted Niska to get them this far, but he wanted to look at the most likely source of answers without the Legatan operative looking over his shoulder.

  Niska seemed to catch some of Damien’s concern and simply nodded his agreement. The two Legatan spies headed for the hangar, and Damien turned his gaze on the faceless mask of Romanov’s pressure suit.

  “This isn’t right,” he said aloud. “How long has this place been abandoned?”

  “No way to tell,” the Marine said. “Not without looking at the computers. Shall we, my lord?”

  Damien nodded and led the way to what Niska had indicated was the administration building. Signage confirmed the Augment’s description almost immediately, and Damien saw that the doors had been chained shut before ice and snow had blockaded them.

  The worry scratching at the edge of his consciousness threw caution to the wind and he cut the chains with a gesture. The snow was easily brushed aside. None of this was powerful enough to set off warning signs, he hoped.

  To a certain extent, he wasn’t sure he cared anymore. There was a vast difference between being told there was a problem at the academies on the UnArcana Worlds and walking through an empty boarding school that should have been home to two hundred young Mages.

  The administration building was just as cold as outside. Possibly colder, even. The front hall was a mess, with a bench overturned and frozen in place and several boxes of files scattered around the area.

  “I’d call that signs of life, but I don’t think it’s even that positive,” Romanov said grimly. “Shall I check what’s in the files?”

  “Go for it,” Damien ordered. “Keep me informed; I’m going to go deeper.”

  There was a directory near the entrance, and Damien quickly located the location of the head administrator, the school’s principal. She’d been on the third floor of the building, in an office that overlooked the courtyard and the rest of the school.

  The stairs were covered in ice, and Damien had to step carefully as he ascended. There was more evidence of chaos as he climbed…but no evidence of violence. There were clear paths to the exits, and most of what appeared to have been discarded was paper records.

  Discarding the paper records made sense, he supposed, if they were in a hurry. A lot of forms were likely still filled out by hand by students or their parents, but all of the information on them should have been in the school’s computers.

  The principal’s office door yielded to his ministrations after a few moments. It had been locked when the woman left, but a standard deadbolt was no match for a stressed-out Hand.

  Posters hung on the walls, the kind of motivational crap that rarely existed outside of schools. There were bookshelves around the room, but they were mostly empty. What was left was a few books that the owner hadn’t cared about and some cheap bric-a-brac.

  It took him a few seconds to confirm that the computer embedded in the desk had been removed. He wasn’t sure whether it would have survived the cold on its own for long, but it wasn’t present at all.

  The papers on the desk gave him at least some idea of what had happened…or at least when it had happened.

  The main contents of the desk were extra copies of a series of form letters, clearly written to be as reassuring as possible, letting parents know that their child had won the “unique opportunity” to study at an “elite institution” at Tau Ceti. Communication would be enabled as much as possible, but visits wouldn’t be doable for several years.

  It was a “unique opportunity,” so far as Damien could tell, that every student here had “won.”

  The worst part was that the letters were old. They were all dated early 2458—six months before the Secession.

  “I’ve got a bunch of letters here telling parents that their kid had a unique opportunity to study at Tau Ceti,” he told the others over the radio. “A lot of them. Looks like a form letter to cover the students being moved somewhere else.

  “What the hell happened to these kids?”

  He was growing more and more certain that he needed to search the surrounding hills for mass graves…and if that was what he found, all hell was going to break loose.

  Damien wasn’t entirely sure he could take on an entire planetary government on his own. The last time he’d done that, he’d coopted a rebellion.

  Anger probably wasn’t a sufficient substitute, but if this was as bad as it was starting to look, he was going to have to test that theory.

  “The hangar is empty,” Niska told him a few minutes later. “There should have been a bunch of helicopters and at least one emergency shuttle here, but they’re all gone.”

  “Any idea where?” Damien demanded.

  “Nothing useful. They headed to the spaceport at Arndale. No idea where they went from there.”

  Damien swallowed a series of curses.

  “Find something,” he snarled.

  Cutting the radio channel, he stalked into the corridor where Romanov had gone through the paper files.

  “Anything useful?”

  “No,” the Marine said shortly. “This is a stack of the power-of-attorney forms that the parents signed. They just…gave these people their kids. Full authority.”

  “It was that or leave the UnArcana Worlds,” Damien replied. He didn’t have a lot of sympathy for anyone involved in this school right now, but he at least half-understood that decision.

  “We’re going to need to sweep the woods around the school if we have time,” he continued. “Looking for…” He trailed off, then swallowed hard. “We need to look for graves.”

  Romanov nodded. Damien couldn’t see his bodyguard’s face, but he didn’t need to.

  “I don’t know if we’ll have time,” he pointed out. “We almost certainly triggered something when we landed here. It’s only a question of how quickly they get here.”

  Damien nodded, leaving the Marine to it while he skimmed down the list of names and titles. The accountant was probably his best option, he supposed.

  He charged down the hallway and kicked the accountant�
��s door open. It didn’t appear to have been locked. Damien didn’t really care.

  His radio crackled to life.

  “This place is a bust,” Niska said. “There are no computers, no papers, no clues. I should have known going anywhere except where Ricket was investigating himself was a waste of time. We need to get out of here, Montgomery.”

  “That’s all you have to say?” Damien demanded. “Two hundred kids are missing and all you have to say is that this is a bust? Is what happened here irrelevant?”

  “No,” the Augment replied. “It’s not. But there’s nothing here to lead me anywhere. Something terrible might have happened here. Or something entirely mundane and we missed the news release on it. You don’t know anything.”

  It was probably a good thing that Niska wasn’t in the room with Damien. It took a lot to make the young man lose his temper, but the cyborg might have been learning to fly if he’d been within sight.

  “I know the next thing I can reasonably search for is fucking mass graves, Niska,” he snapped. “And if murdering children isn’t a big deal for you, maybe I should be reconsidering who I’m working with.”

  The radio was silent.

  “You know better,” Niska finally said. “I just don’t see anything here that can help us find out what happened, and we only have so much time.”

  Damien muted his microphone and snarled, barely resisting the urge to start blasting out walls.

  Glaring at the walls, however, he spotted something he hadn’t been expecting to see. The accountant had apparently had the relatively common habit of printing out her invoices for review before she paid them. There were a dozen sheets of paper stuck to a board designed for just that purpose.

  But they were all slightly misaligned. Most accountants Damien had met would have made very sure that the sheets were all perfectly straight. He crossed to the wall and shifted a page to line it up.

  There was a line drawn on the board underneath. He tore the invoice for a bulk order of soup off the board to see what it covered.