He shook his head.
“That said, yes, it’ll get us to the planet and down. Getting everyone off the planet is going to take some more chicanery, but that’s why I’m coming with you.” Kelzin cracked his knuckles. “I haven’t worked for MISS this long without learning a few tricks I can play to get us into the air without questions.”
“Good. Based off last time, we might need to run fast,” Damien said. “We might not even know in advance!”
“Everyone’s sticking together,” Niska promised, his voice tired. “We’re in hostile territory here, Montgomery. Once we’re down, I’ll book a meeting with an old friend, but…I don’t know how far friendship will go.”
“We find out the hard way, then,” Damien said calmly. “But one way or another, we find out where that damn liner stopped.”
“Worst-case scenario, we have to break into the archives for traffic control.”
The Hand snorted, remembering a time when he’d broken into a set of corporate archives in Tau Ceti. Roslyn Chambers had served Mars long before she’d put on a uniform, after all.
“And me without a convenient juvenile delinquent,” he murmured.
Spacer hotels were much the same the galaxy over, in Damien’s experience, though the one they booked into after landing was an unusually run-down example of the breed. This one was a concrete block barely five minutes’ walk from the landing pad they’d come in through, with an automated check-in that asked for only the most perfunctory of IDs.
“I’m guessing this is a hub for those people-smugglers we were talking about?” Damien asked under his breath as they selected a block of four rooms and paid without the system even asking for a level of ID complex enough to require any significant faking.
“At the very least, the people running it are perfectly happy to take money without asking questions,” O’Malley agreed. “Want to take bets on the number of lumps in the beds?”
“I’ll settle for no bugs,” he told her. “I can deal with the rest.”
He could deal with bugs, too, if he had to. Of course, dealing with lumps on the bed meant ignoring them, and dealing with bugs meant magically fumigating the room. One was a tad more active.
“Check out the rooms, make your calls,” he instructed the two LMID Augments. “Meet up in the bar across the way in an hour?”
“Bar might be overvaluing that institution,” Niska replied. “I imagine it’s as likely to be asking questions as this place is, though, and that has value all its own.” He nodded. “An hour, then. Should be enough to at least make contact.”
Leaving the rest of his companions behind, Damien stepped into his room and studied the setup. He was glad he hadn’t taken O’Malley’s bet—he’d have bet high and it looked like the bed was perfectly serviceable.
Nothing in the room was new but it was all solid. Threadbare and worn but still clean and comfortable—more than he’d expected for the level of hotel they’d found.
He sighed and dropped carefully onto the bed, letting his suitcase roll across the room untouched. The process of pretending to be using his hands while actually moving his bag with magic was frustrating if not particularly draining.
It was risky, too. Thaumic detectors were notoriously unreliable, using scans for thermal bloom as much as any ability to actually detect magic, but they kept being used because they did work.
Any time Damien used magic to do something someone else could do with their hands, he created a small heat bloom around the area he was manipulating. The illusion he had woven around himself to appear as a different person was less obvious in many ways. It was a more powerful and extended spell, but any given point was less energetic than his telekinesis.
And that energy was easily lost in the background heat of a human. An unexpected bloom around his suitcase handle might draw unwanted attention from a smart Augment—and raise questions about Mages with crippled hands.
Damien was sure there were other Mages in the galaxy without the full use of their hands, but there was no question that the First Hand of Mars was the most famous.
He needed to be careful. His presence there was necessary—he didn’t think anyone else could ride herd on Niska—but it was also a risk.
He might look like a blond man five centimeters taller than Damien Montgomery right now, but Damien Montgomery was the Republic’s Enemy Number One. Even the slightest hint of his presence could bring down hell.
But somewhere in this mess was the secret of what had happened to the Mage children of the Republic. A secret that Bryan Ricket had died for.
And if Damien needed to bring down hell himself to find that secret, well…he could.
And he would.
The hotel had failed to live down to its appearances, managing to provide exactly the kind of cheap and private lodgings needed near spaceports without sacrificing on the fundamental quality. It might have appeared run-down, but Damien had been impressed by its actual quality.
The bar across the street had apparently tried to live up to its run-down drunk spacer bar appearance and failed to rise to even that low standard. Something had spilled on the floor next to the table they’d taken, and been allowed to dry to stickiness. The table itself had clearly had more interactions with violence than with cleaning cloths, with a head-sized dent on one side connected to a crack that ran the whole length of the table.
There was no wait staff visible at all, and Damien suspected that the reason the bartender seemed anchored to a specific part of the bar was because that was where the shotgun was hidden. The other end of the bar contained what had probably been electronic gambling machines at one point, but one of the man-high devices had been knocked over and the other two had clearly been introduced to the stool in front of them.
When O’Malley joined them at the table with four beers, they were in bottles and still sealed.
“I’m not sure I trust the lines to the tap here,” she confessed as she popped all four lids with a rapid, practiced gesture.
“The tag on the door says it was inspected two months ago,” Damien pointed out, surveying the space. “I’m presuming that means they passed, but…”
Shouting at the other end of the bar covered him trailing off. There were half a dozen spacers there watching some kind of sport, but the holographic display had just shorted out.
The bartender shouted back, one of the women in the group struck the projector with the side of her bottle, and the game flickered back to life.
“I glanced at those guys’ food as I walked by,” O’Malley said. “It’s possible the kitchen is clean, though I’m not taking bets that what was poured over those nachos is actually cheese.”
“Find somewhere else to eat,” Niska said, the Augment looking tired as he dropped a covert white-noise generator on the table. “We’re here to talk in private, not judge the damn décor.”
“Fair enough, boss. What have we got?” the redheaded Nueva Bolivian native asked.
“I reached out to three people I know are on this planet via the old codes and dead drops,” Niska told them. “All three were LMID and were people I trusted.”
“And the but?” Damien asked.
“They’re RID now,” Niska said flatly. “I don’t think I gave enough information in the drops to get myself picked up, but the only friends who can help us work for Republic counterintelligence.”
Damien sighed.
“And this is why nobody told me who we were reaching out to beyond ‘friends,’ isn’t it?” he asked. Sooner or later, he was pretty sure Niska was going to get them all killed.
“I trust these people,” the Augment replied. “There are two more ex-LMID agents on the planet I don’t, and we’re not talking to them at all.”
Further conversation was interrupted by a ping on Niska’s wrist-comp. Damien took a swallow of his beer as the Legatan went over the message.
It wasn’t bad. He suspected O’Malley knew the beer there relatively well, though, and had picked something sa
fe. He’d rather have a good coffee, really, but he wasn’t trusting the coffee in this bar.
“I have a bite,” Niska said slowly. “Not one of the people I intentionally contacted, but he’d have access to the same codes and dead drops.”
“That’s not a great sign, Niska,” Damien pointed out.
“No. Except that unlike the people I was aiming to get in touch with, Connor’s area of responsibility is orbital,” the Augment replied. “He’d be the man responsible for countering any attempt to steal STC’s information.”
“And if he’s responsible for orbit and in-system space here, he’s almost certainly been tasked with trying to catch runaway indentures,” O’Malley pointed out. “So, either he has no soul…or he might be broken enough to be looking for a way out.”
“If he wants a way out, we can give him that,” Damien said. “Presuming he has the information we need.”
“There’s a meet location and time,” Niska replied. “About an hour from now…and at a much nicer restaurant than this!”
31
The taxi dropped Damien and Niska off a block or so from the meeting ground, and the Hand carefully did not notice the second taxi traveling farther with Romanov and O’Malley.
“Keep your eyes open,” the Augment spy told him. “I don’t trust this.”
“Who is this ‘Connor’?” Damien asked.
The sidewalk was quiet and there were enough vehicles on the street to cover up their conversation. There was nowhere safer to talk about this available.
“Connor De Santis,” Niska said. “An LMID counterintelligence analyst before the Secession, primarily working with law enforcement. He took a transfer to RID for a big promotion and ended up assigned out here.”
Niska shook his head.
“He’s an ass,” he concluded. “I don’t think he ever met a woman he didn’t at least try to make a pass at, and his taste in men was equally enthusiastic, if generally more directed. I never worked with him, but he had a reputation around the Directorate.
“I got analysis from him a few times and it was good work, but I could avoid working with him. So I did.”
“Wonderful,” Damien said grimly. “So, you have no idea how he feels about the Secession or the War?”
“Not a damn clue,” Niska replied. “I’m not even sure why he responded to the breadcrumbs I left out. I wouldn’t have thought he knew me well enough to put the pieces together—and even if he did, we weren’t friends. We weren’t even acquaintances.”
“You just said he was an intelligence analyst,” Damien pointed out. “Are you really surprised he put together the pieces?”
“In the long run? No,” the older man admitted. “This quickly? Yes.”
The restaurant De Santis had sent them to was a rooftop patio on the top of a three-story mall. The open sightlines made Damien nervous as he glanced around. He’d had bad experiences with meetings at rooftop restaurants in the past.
A ping on his wrist-comp told him that Romanov had the patio under observation from a nearby building. The Combat Mage couldn’t leap onto the patio from the ground, but he could quite handily smuggle in the components of a disassembled sniper rifle.
O’Malley, on the other hand, could leap onto the patio from the ground floor. If De Santis was planning trouble, it was going to be a messy day for a lot of people.
“Party of two,” Niska told the neatly dressed older man at the front desk of the restaurant. “We’re part of a reservation, should be under De Santis.”
The man flipped through a digital screen for a few seconds.
“Ah yes, of course. Follow me, please?”
He led them out onto the patio and then, to Damien’s surprise and discomfort, to a door into an additional two-story extension of the main mall structure. He could see the glint of glass above them, suggesting that there were more rooms at the top of the building.
“Señor De Santis booked one of our private rooms, just up the stairs here,” the host told them. The door slid open at a touch. “Follow me.”
This wasn’t great to Damien’s mind, but he tapped a command on his wrist-comp telling Romanov not to immediately leap into action. The lack of live overwatch wasn’t great, but it wasn’t going to change the end result.
Not when they had an Augment and a Marine Combat Mage for backup…and the people in the room were an Augment and the First Hand of the Mage-King of Mars!
The room the host escorted them to held a single man, currently facing away from them and looking out over the city with his hands clasped behind his back.
De Santis—presuming this was Connor De Santis—was a tall man with pitch-black hair and heavily tanned skin. His reflection suggested that he was heavily bearded but that his eyes were definitely on Niska and Damien.
“We’ll have three of the chef’s special,” the RID agent told the host. “A bottle of the house red, three glasses, and waters. Knock before entering, please.”
“Of course.”
The host withdrew and De Santis chuckled as the distinctive buzz of a white noise generator filled the room.
“If you’re wondering, James, I own the restaurant,” he told them. “Sean and I have a number of investment properties here in Nueva Bolivia, though we’ve been moving funds toward Legatus as well.
“This system doesn’t sit well with either of our tastes, we discovered,” the agent said with a sigh. “Sean says hello, by the way. There was no way he could get free to meet you—it’s his department that’s investigating just what a certain rogue ex-LMID ship was doing here.”
“That answers part of my first question, I suppose, if you’re working with Sean Jezek,” Niska said as he took a seat. “I was wondering why you answered my drop instead of him. He was the one I was expecting to hear from!”
“‘Working with’ is one way of phrasing it,” De Santis said with a chuckle. “I married Sean six months ago.”
He sighed and turned to face them. The beard was even more impressive from the front than it was in the reflection, covering almost all of De Santis’s face in thick black hair. It was well taken-care-of and evenly cut, but there was enough of it to be shocking all on its own.
“I’m guessing you were aboard Starlight,” he said bluntly. “Which means you were involved in the attempt to steal a Link in Arsenault, which leaves me with one pressing question of my own, Niska:
“Who the hell are you working for now?”
“No one,” Niska said quietly. “Maata is working for me. I’m operating alone.”
“Bullshit.” De Santis pointed at Damien. “I’m not a combat Augment, Niska, but my eyes are no more organic than yours. I can recognize the heat bloom of a full-body illusion spell when I see it.
“You arrived in the system aboard a former LMID covert ops ship gone rogue—a ship that has now been destroyed, so how you’re standing in my restaurant arguing with me is a matter of some question to begin with—accompanied by a Mage and in the wake of trying to steal a Link.
“You’re working for Mars.”
Niska sighed.
“I’m working with Mars,” he conceded. “But I’m operating under LMID authority. Black protocols activated on Ricket’s death.”
“I’ll accept that, for now, but you’d better talk quickly if you expect me to let you leave,” De Santis told him. “Sean trusts you more than me, so you get this meet. I’ll even allow that I’ll probably let you leave for that. I don’t really want to piss off my husband, after all.
“But if you want the help your message asked for, you’re going to have to sell me hard. Because smuggling an illegal Mage onto Sucre is a crime at best—and if he’s an MISS agent, easily treason.”
“Oh, we’re well past treason,” Niska murmured. There was a knock on the door. “How about we get our food and then I tell you why I’m here…and who I brought with me.”
After the waiter delivered the food and drinks and slipped back out, the room was silent for several long seconds. Damien
took a moment to study the plates out of sheer awkwardness.
The “chef’s special” was some kind of fried chicken on top of what might have been pancakes of some kind, along with strips of lettuce and other vegetables. It looked like someone had heard of the concept of chicken and waffles and tried to create something healthier…and then someone else had turned it into pub food.
“You have my attention, Niska,” De Santis finally said. He picked up a glass of wine the waiter had poured and shook his head. “Just from the fact I’m here, you can guess I think something’s rotten—but I’m a long way from contemplating treason.”
“Damien, drop the illusion, please,” Niska asked.
With a chuckle, Damien obeyed, and then grabbed his own glass of wine with magic as De Santis tried not to choke.
His face had been all over the Protectorate even before the Secession. Any intelligence officer in the Republic who didn’t recognize him was terrible at their job—though he’d found his height confused people.
“That is Damien fucking Montgomery,” De Santis finally said.
“Yes,” Niska confirmed.
“The Sword of Mars. The First Hand of the goddamn Mage-King.” The RID agent was staring at Damien, who silently toasted the other man with his free-floating wineglass.
“You’re right. This is way past treason. I don’t know if there’s a word for what bringing Darth Montgomery onto a Republic world is!”
“Desperation,” Damien suggested. “And I hate that nickname. Right now, however, Agent De Santis, I think we share an objective—or at the very least, a moral and ethical duty and calling.”
“I really can’t see that,” De Santis snapped. He put the wine glass down and glared at Niska. “This is too much. I can’t not turn in the Sword of Mars.”
“Agent, do you really think I’m going to let you leave before Niska says his piece?” Damien asked gently. “I’m not going to hurt you unless you make me, but you are going to hear us out.”
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