Sword of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “Ow,” the commander of the Royal Martian Navy’s Second Fleet declared in a pained voice, brushing hot liquid off of her wrist. “Could you have let me swallow before you said that, Lieutenant?”

  Magic flurried around the Admiral as she spoke, instantly bleaching the stain out of her uniform sleeve and sweeping the liquid onto a tissue she tossed into the middle of the desk.

  “You and your predecessors have been the opposite of political appointees,” the Admiral replied. “You are probably the most-connected Flag Lieutenant I’ve ever had, though to be fair, you’ve been shepherded a good way by Hand Montgomery.

  “And because you’ve worked for me, you are now known by face and name by about a fifth of the flag officers in the RMN. You’ve done well, and that means you’re known positively by those officers.

  “It’ll help you in the future.”

  “And right now, sir?” Roslyn said quietly. “I just hope I’m doing well enough that I’m not hindering you.”

  “You’re doing okay,” Alexander repeated. “Which means, of course, I’m going to make you work harder. It’s been two days since we received any updated reports on anything. By now, Captain Menendez should have something complete for an assessment of the shipbuilding at Legatus.”

  Captain Mirjam Menendez was the senior intelligence officer in Second Fleet. She and her analysts were tucked away in a secluded part of Righteous Shield of Valor’s copious corridors—not least because even Menendez’s rank was a courtesy. She and her team were seconded from the Martian Interstellar Security Service, and she’d been commissioned to give her a leg to stand on with Navy officers.

  “She’s sent over some summaries,” Roslyn said carefully.

  “And they’re crap and she knows it,” Alexander said grimly. “I know we don’t have perfect data, Chambers, but we’ve got information. We had enough for me to plan this damn operation, so I need you and Menendez to make sure that I have the most up-to-date assessment of the Legatus System’s defenses, focusing on Centurion and Legatus, as possible.”

  “You want me to kick an RMN Captain and senior MISS agent into getting to work, sir?” Roslyn asked carefully.

  “I want you to kick her in the ass until the job is done, Lieutenant,” Alexander replied. “She knows who you report to—and I want your hands in the analysis as well. You’ve seen more battles against these people than anyone who didn’t serve on Stand in Righteousness’s bridge from the beginning.

  “You have a background Captain Menendez can’t match. Let’s see what you find that she couldn’t.”

  It turned out that Roslyn had underestimated just how tucked away the MISS detachment was. She pulled the location from the ship’s computer and started hunting for it. Eventually, after passing underneath a massive assembly that she thought was one of the primary missile magazines for the upper starboard broadside, she found the listed location.

  Despite the sheer size of the battleship, these corridors were cramped. They’d lost at least twenty centimeters of the usual height to scrape in extra cubage for the magazine. Despite that, it looked like there were an entire block of quarters, several offices and a conference room tucked away down here.

  Who exactly the designers had intended this section of the ship to serve—other than short people—was beyond Roslyn Chambers, but it was where they’d stuck the intelligence section.

  She stepped up to the office that her wrist-comp told her held Captain Menendez and knocked sharply.

  The admittance chime automatically sounded in response, and the door slid open.

  “Come in. Who is it?” a tired voice shouted.

  Roslyn stepped in and crisply saluted.

  “Mage-Lieutenant Roslyn Chambers, from Mage-Admiral Alexander’s staff, sir,” she introduced herself. “I’m looking for Captain Menendez?”

  The woman leaning on the desk didn’t say anything initially, just examining Roslyn in silence. It was hard to tell with her sitting, but she looked to be of a similar petite build to Roslyn herself, though she was blonde to Roslyn’s redder hair.

  “I’m Menendez,” she replied. “Drop the Captain bullshit, Chambers,” she continued as Roslyn realized the other woman was wearing a suit, not a uniform. “It may make the Navy feel better about having me aboard, but I’m a data analyst, not a soldier.”

  “There are a lot of people in uniform aboard this ship who are data analysts, Agent Menendez,” Roslyn told her. She took a seat without asking, studying the other woman in turn.

  Menendez looked…exhausted. In fact, unless Roslyn missed her guess, Menendez looked like she was on the wrong end of a two-day bender.

  Roslyn had shared that experience, once, and decided to limit her exposure to the Protectorate’s legal and illegal pharmaceuticals afterward. She’d helped a few friends through them afterward, though, and she recognized the signs.

  Signs it made no damn sense for the senior intelligence agent aboard Second Fleet’s flagship to be showing.

  “Sir, are you all right?” Roslyn asked when she realized Menendez hadn’t said anything for several seconds.

  “I’m fine,” she snapped. “What does the Admiral want?”

  Roslyn considered the various approaches available to her, and then decided on “tough love.”

  “The Admiral wants to know what the hell you’re doing down here, since apparently it isn’t assembling the updated report on Legatus’s defenses she asked for,” she said flatly. “And from your current state, I’d guess something closer to a two-day drug bender than your actual job.”

  Menendez finally showed a reaction to that, lunging to her feet as her face flashed red.

  Unfortunately for her, she lost her balance and fell over her desk. Slamming her stomach into the cheap plastic surface, she promptly vomited everywhere.

  A shield of magic kept the mess away from Roslyn—she’d expected something similar—and she rose to calmly look down on the intelligence officer.

  “What the hell is going on, Agent?” she snapped.

  Menendez groaned.

  “I don’t… I don’t… What the fuck?” she managed to moan. “I’ve just had coffee… I haven’t even left my offi…” She pulled herself sufficiently off her desk to look up at Roslyn.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Nineteen hundred twenty-six hours OMT,” Roslyn replied. “June thirtieth.”

  The intelligence officer stared at her.

  “I haven’t left my office in forty hours, Lieutenant,” she said slowly, careful to enunciate each word clearly. “Something’s not—”

  Menendez passed out on her desk and Roslyn swallowed, wincing at the smell.

  She stepped over to study the coffee cup. It was a third full and still warm. Someone had topped it up for the senior intel officer relatively recently, but…

  Roslyn tapped a command into her wrist-comp.

  “Chief Sinclair?” she said into it as the com channel. “I need somebody to run a drug test on a sample for me and keep it entirely under wraps.

  “Know anyone in the MPs we can lean on with Her Highness’s name?”

  23

  Chief Olivia Sinclair arrived roughly ten minutes later with a dark-skinned middle-aged man in the uniform of shipboard Military Police, plus standard-issue turban.

  “Sergeant Chetan Hersch,” he introduced himself tersely as he studied the room.

  Roslyn had managed to get Menendez off her desk, laying the woman on the ground in the recovery position. She’d checked to be sure the woman’s airways were clear and that she was breathing, but then left her be.

  Managing to not touch anything else in the room had been a struggle, but she couldn’t be sure just what had happened yet.

  “Sergeant,” she greeted the MP. She gestured to the unconscious woman on the floor. “That is Captain Menendez, our senior MISS analyst. She looks to me like she’s now sleeping off a multi-day bender…but she didn’t seem to have a damn clue what was going on.”

&
nbsp; “That’s not an uncommon effect of a bender,” the MP said calmly.

  “And if she were anyone except the person supposed to brief Admiral Alexander on the status of Legatus’s defenses, I’d write it off as that,” Roslyn agreed.

  “Doesn’t all new intelligence come through Captain Menendez’s desk?” Chief Sinclair asked in a concerned tone. “If she’s out of it…”

  “Damn.” Roslyn looked over at the unconscious woman again. “That would explain why the reports we were getting didn’t look like they had new data at all. If she’s out, then our entire intelligence team is running on old data.”

  Hersch grunted.

  “And I know the Captain’s reputation,” he said gruffly. “Her staff don’t bother her when she’s working. She’s notorious for ripping off heads and asking questions later.”

  “Depending on what drugs she was on, that would have been made even worse,” Roslyn replied. “I need to know what she got hit with, Sergeant, and how it was delivered.”

  “I’m guessing you don’t think she’s an addict?” the MP asked dryly.

  “It’s possible,” Roslyn conceded. “But given that the Admiral’s operations officer was a Republic spy, I’m not going to rule out enemy action just yet.

  “Check her coffee first,” she ordered. “The rather abbreviated conversation I had with her suggested she’d been in here drinking coffee for at least twenty-four hours straight.”

  Which would, now that she thought about it, explain one of the smells wafting through the place.

  “Her coffee was fresh when I checked, so she has a coffeemaker here somewhere…but I’m damned suspicious of it, no matter where it’s hiding.”

  Hersch was already producing a portable chemistry kit and a set of thin blue gloves.

  “You make a compelling case, sir,” he conceded. “Even if you didn’t, well, the Mage-Admiral is a powerful name to conjure with. I should be able to identify most drugs that could have been snuck into the coffee with the kit.

  “Give me a few minutes.” He glanced around the office. “And don’t touch anything else. Everything in here could be a clue.”

  It took Hersch about fifteen minutes to complete the analysis, by which point Menendez was loudly snoring in the corner of the office.

  The MP shook his head as he looked at the results.

  “Kite,” he told Roslyn. “Not sure which variety, the analyzer is confused. It’s giving me sixty percent likelihood of Silver Kite, but also a sixty percent likelihood of Red Kite.”

  “That’s because Red Kite is White Kite with caffeine added,” Roslyn said with a sigh. Kite, in its several varieties, had been three of the top six best-selling illegal street drugs on Tau Ceti in her misspent youth. White Kite was the basic form, but Red and Silver were probably more popular.

  “Most people wouldn’t add Silver Kite to coffee,” she continued. “By the time you’ve laced the Kite with cocaine to smooth some of its nastier effects, well, it’s too damn expensive to mix with caffeine pills or pour into anything else.”

  “Why the hell would they put Silver Kite in coffee?” Hersch asked, the MP also clearly wanting to ask how the Admiral’s Flag Lieutenant knew so much about illegal drugs.

  “Because Kite screws with your sense of time normally and Silver Kite is worse for that,” she said grimly. “Red Kite, on the other hand, augments the existing high from the base drug but leads to the worst crash. You can get the same high with two-thirds of the amount of White Kite, so dealers make Red Kite to stretch the supply and make more money.”

  “And the addicts keep coming back, regardless of the crash,” Sinclair said grimly. “That’s fucked up.”

  “Yes. And because it’s a common street drug on half a dozen Protectorate worlds, it’s hardly out of the question for Menendez to have been dosing herself on it,” Roslyn said quietly. “But if there’s some still in the coffee, she’s been repeatedly dosed over multiple days.”

  She shook her head and turned to Sinclair.

  “Chief Sinclair, we need to get her to the infirmary,” she continued firmly. “Quiet is better, but the only person I know who ran this kind of bender with recurring doses of any kind of Kite died. And he died ugly.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Sinclair promised. “You good here?”

  “Sergeant, I need you to do whatever you need with her computers ASAP,” Roslyn ordered. “Then you’re going to go over the rest of the room while I go through her data.”

  “You’ll need the Admiral’s codes for that,” the Chief pointed out.

  Roslyn paused carefully and then forced a nod.

  “Of course; I’ll touch base with her.”

  The thought that Alexander could open up the computer hadn’t even occurred to her. She’d been planning on hacking in.

  “Somebody wanted to be damn sure that the latest updates on Legatus got hung up at Menendez’s desk. They were relying on the hard crash she’s about to have to make people stop questioning why the reports had been delayed, and on her staff being distracted,” Roslyn said grimly.

  “I don’t know about anybody else, but I guarantee that Mage-Admiral Alexander is going to want to know why…and who.”

  “I might be able to find out who, Lieutenant,” Hersch told her. “Why…will take a while longer.”

  “I think the answer to why, Sergeant, is in Ms. Menendez’s computers,” Roslyn said. “Which means I need to make that call.”

  “What’s going on, Chambers?” Alexander asked. Roslyn knew perfectly well she was interrupting the Admiral’s supper, but she didn’t have a choice—and Alexander sounded surprisingly calm about it.

  “I need your authorization codes to break open Captain Menendez’s data files,” Roslyn said as quickly as she could. “She’s headed to sick bay. Someone was dosing her with dangerous levels of a nasty street drug from Tau Ceti to keep her stoned out of her mind and unable to work.

  “She’s going to have an ugly crash, and the entire intelligence update we received before leaving Ardennes is locked up in her computer.”

  Alexander was silent for a few seconds.

  “That is a terrible way to run a department,” she noted. “Are you certain?”

  “Our intel officer apparently has a reputation, sir.”

  “We’ll deal with that later. You have the situation under control?” the Admiral asked.

  “I think so,” Roslyn admitted. “I have an MP searching Menendez’s office for evidence, and Chief Sinclair is moving her to sick bay. Everyone is under orders to keep things quiet until we know more. I’m…” She sighed. “I’m guessing we still have a Republican Agent aboard.”

  “I’m sending you the codes you need,” Alexander told her. “They’re one-time keys, though they can be abused in a few ways. Don’t abuse them.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, sir.”

  “I’m also going to get a Secret Service detail down there ASAP,” the Admiral continued, her voice still calm. “If someone put this much effort into keeping that intel buried, I suspect they’re watching her office—and that means you and the MP are moving rapidly up their target list.”

  That thought hadn’t occurred to Roslyn.

  “Yes, sir.” She swallowed. “Would appreciate the backup, sir.”

  “They’ll be on their way in a moment. Be careful, Lieutenant Chambers. I don’t want to have to train a new Flag Lieutenant; am I clear?”

  “Perfectly, sir.”

  The channel cut to silence and Roslyn’s wrist-comp chimed to tell her it had received the one-time override codes. She shivered, looking at the innocuous file that she suspected could open any computer aboard Righteous Shield of Valor.

  “I probably should have asked this sooner, Sergeant,” she said, her voice admirably calm to even her ears, “but you do have your sidearm on you, yes?”

  Hersch coughed.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Admiral Alexander just pointed out that we’re currently undoing somebody’s clever
plan,” Roslyn noted. “They might get cranky.”

  “Ah. Of course, sir.”

  The dark-skinned Tau Cetan officer seemed to take that in stride—but Roslyn also saw him pause his search to draw his sidearm, check its magazine…and take the safety off.

  Both of them had work to do, and the young Mage-Lieutenant suddenly found herself wishing for eyes in the back of her head.

  If that was possible with magic, though, it was outside her skill set!

  The document that was live on Menendez’s computer was potentially the single most garbled piece of text Roslyn had ever attempted to read—and she’d actually managed to read her gang-leader ex-boyfriend’s attempt to write fiction while stoned.

  It looked like the intelligence agent had been trying to put together a summary of the intelligence, but her drugged brain had been uncooperative at best and actively sabotaging her at worst.

  With a sigh, Roslyn closed that file and pulled up the actual intelligence. Rhapsody in Twilight had made a pass through the Legatus System three days before Second Fleet had left Ardennes. The stealth ship had reached an RTA in time to transmit before they’d moved, but that meant that all Menendez had received was a transcript of an audio conversation transmitted across a hundred or so light-years by magic.

  And it was horrendously confusing to Roslyn, a slew of acronyms and shorthand used to make sure that the information was communicated as quickly as possible. Fortunately, it looked like Menendez had kept a glossary on hand for translating the shorthand, which helped.

  CBG-ID-A reloc Cent. New CBG, ID-B, arrv at Legt. CBG-ID-B BBs, 3, reloc Cent.

  Carrier Battle Group A relocated…to Centurion? A new carrier group, designated B, had arrived at Legatus—but their battleships had been sent to Centurion. Three of them.

  That was…potentially problematic. Second Fleet could certainly take those forces, but with the carrier group they expected still at Legatus, they might miss that another one was at Centurion—and a full carrier group reinforced with three battleships would be a nasty surprise as they tangled with Centurion’s outer defenses.