Unspoken was that if De Santis pushed too hard, Damien would have to kill him. He wouldn’t like doing so, but one more face in his nightmares was much less likely to wreck their mission.
De Santis met his gaze and seemed to consider for a moment. He hadn’t tried to rise yet, though, so he was taking the warning seriously.
“Talk,” he ordered.
“You were with LMID long enough to see Case Prodigal Son written,” Niska said. “That’s the authority I’m operating under.”
“Bullshit. Only Ricket could activate that—and Ricket would never contemplate treason.”
“Ricket is dead, Connor,” the older spy said very quietly. “You knew that. But you’re RID…did you know the RID killed him?”
The room was silent again.
“No,” the heavily bearded man said quietly. After a moment, he picked up his wineglass again and drained it. “I believe you,” he admitted. “I’ve heard enough strangeness around Ricket’s death that it fits, but no. I didn’t know that.”
“He was investigating something,” Niska said levelly. “I don’t know what. All I originally knew was that he triggered Prodigal Son. An old friend left more information in the datanets for me and others to find.
“It hadn’t made it to Arsenault yet, but I scanned it as we were coming in. All encrypted and concealed, of course. New LMID protocols nobody else knew.”
Damien sighed. Eventually, Niska was going to tell him everything as it came up.
“We’re still not sure of what he was investigating, but it caught the Lord Protector’s attention,” the Augment continued. “Solace invited him to a meeting to discuss his concerns. Instead, Ricket was kidnapped by three RID agents.
“They didn’t even interrogate him, Connor,” Niska half-whispered. “They drove him out into the middle of nowhere, shot him in the back of the head and dumped his body in a river.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“Because the last LMID agent on Legatus stayed because she was too damn angry to let things slide,” the Augment snapped. “Brecker captured one of the agents who carried out the hit—and she did interrogate the bastard.
“From the codes she sent, Brecker’s dead now. There are no agents of the Legatus Military Intelligence Directorate left on Legatus. Any who survived have at least fled our homeworld…or defected.”
“You defected.”
“It’s complicated, but basically, yes,” Niska admitted. “The Republic Intelligence Directorate murdered Bryan Ricket, Connor. They murdered one of our founding fathers. What the hell did he find that was worth that?”
De Santis grimaced and rose, turning away from them to look out the window again.
“There shouldn’t have been anything for him to find,” he admitted. “If there was…”
“Then our country might not be what we swore to serve,” Niska agreed.
“I was Ricket’s right-hand man, one of the last senior agents left after the RID transfers,” he continued. “Even I didn’t know he was carrying on the investigation until the end, and all I knew was where he started: the Mage Academies.”
“Fuck me.” De Santis’s curse hung in the air. “I never even thought to ask the damn question.”
“Neither did I. So, Hand Montgomery and I went poking around Arsenault—and every one of those kids is missing, Connor. Two hundred–plus teenagers got loaded up onto a transport.”
“And sent here, I’m guessing,” the RID agent concluded. “Because this system is the Republic’s secondary hub at this point, with all of the bullshit that entails.”
He was still staring out the window.
“I was vaguely aware of Nueva Bolivia indentured workers on Legatus,” he said quietly. “I assumed it was, well, what they claimed it was. Long-term work contracts with attached statutory deductions to pay off debts or whatever.
“Then I got here, and supporting the people making sure no one escaped become part of my job.”
No one interrupted him as he paused, marshaling his thoughts.
“Twenty-six percent, Niska,” he finally said. “That’s the fatality rate of a ten-year indenture contract. There’s no life insurance, no payout to your family. No payment at all unless the contract’s complete.
“So, the people who die…their families get nothing. And a quarter of the men and women who get caught up in the contracts died. Twenty-year indentures are worse…and guess what there have been more of since the Secession.
“Those mines fuel the factories that are building weapons for the Republic Navy,” De Santis concluded. “The factories, too, are now primarily operated by indentures. There weren’t enough indentures before the Secession, but the Republic rules for who they can sell into fucking slavery are looser than the old Nueva Bolivian government’s rules.”
“Any sacrifice for the war,” Niska said quietly.
“If our war machine—our nation—is fueled by slaves and lies, who do we serve?” De Santis asked. He turned around and looked at Montgomery.
“Answer me one question, ‘Lord’ Montgomery,” he snapped. “It was you who laid the case for the Inquest before the Council of the Protectorate. Here, they say it was lies. Was it?”
“No.” Damien let the word stand alone. He didn’t need to say more. The Protectorate had made sure that the Inquest files were made public, even in the Republic, as they pulled the Mages out.
“The Lord Protector claims we didn’t want a war, that our first strike was a functionally defensive countermeasure against the attack you were preparing,” De Santis told him. “I’m guessing that is a lie?”
“From the moment Councilor McClintlock declared the Secession, we planned to let the Republic go,” Damien told him. “We were concerned about Republican aggression, yes, and moved some ships to the border and began building more, but…we weren’t planning a war.”
He snorted.
“And believe me, Agent De Santis, if we had been planning a war, I’d have been involved.”
The room was silent again.
“I want out,” Connor De Santis finally said. “Two tickets to Mars, safe tickets, for my husband and me. I don’t want to defect, I don’t want to betray the Republic…I just want out.”
“We can make that happen,” Niska told him. “But we need you to help us first. That transport with two hundred teens aboard came here. I can give you its registration, name and expected arrival time.
“I need you to tell me where they went.”
“We’ll have to pull you out with us,” Damien noted carefully. “And believe me, I’m not any happier about you on my covert ops ship than you are, but I can’t guarantee that we can get you out another way.”
De Santis stared out the window for a full minute.
“I’ll talk to Sean,” he finally said. “We can only liquidate and move so much money. Fleeing the Republic could cost us everything, but…I don’t know if I can serve this nation anymore.
“Regardless, Niska, Montgomery, I’ll find out where that ship went to. I don’t know what answer you’re going to find at the end of your search, and I’m not sure I want to know.
“But if Bryan Ricket died for it, then the least I can do is help dig it up.”
32
The next evening saw them in a different restaurant, much closer to the spaceport. This time, Connor De Santis had brought Sean Jezek. The RID agent’s swarthy, hook-nosed husband wasn’t what Damien would have called attractive, but from the way the two men treated each other, De Santis clearly doted on him.
“Do you own this one, too?” Damien asked as they were ushered to a table on a raised section overlooking the main dining area. Looking around the small restaurant with its old-fashioned wood panels and flooring, he saw that there were two other similar areas, though those both held more tables.
Theirs only had the one four-person table right now, though he suspected it normally held more.
“No, I just paid for their chef’s special dinner tabl
e,” Jezek replied, his voice just as gravely as Damien would have expected from his appearance. “On no notice, but they had an opening tonight so it was only five thousand pounds.”
Damien was only vaguely aware of what his salary was and operated with a budget that was functionally “yes, sir.” The concept of a five-thousand-pound table hurt his head, even if that was “only” thirty-five hundred Martian dollars. He’d paid that for meals, but not for just four people!
“It’s a polite way of buying private space, I suppose,” he conceded.
“Agreed.” Niska dropped his white-noise generator on the table and covered it with a napkin. Their waiter would notice it, but at a five-thousand-pound entry price, Damien suspected it would go unremarked.
“Connor and I talked last night,” Sean told them. “Just by meeting you, we’re putting ourselves in danger. I’m back-office for counterintelligence here, and I’ve already heard a lot that makes me uncomfortable.”
He sighed.
“And CI’s people are bad enough. The Internal Security team, well…” He shrugged. “They’re unabashed secret police and going downhill by the day. As I believe Connor told you, we want out.”
“You’re rich,” Damien pointed out bluntly. “You’ll lose that.”
“I was always rich,” Jezek said with a chuckle. “Connor is still getting used to the idea. We have assets in the Protectorate as well. We’ll be fine so long as we get across the border safely.”
“We’re not heading straight home,” the Hand warned. “We need specific intel from you and we’ll be actioning that. You’ll be riding shotgun for a while before we can drop you off in Protectorate space.”
“We’ll survive,” De Santis said bluntly. “Better than I’ll survive running down any more runaway slaves.”
“Exactly,” Jezek agreed. “Connor is probably going to be all stuffy and honorable and refuse to help you lot beyond what we’ve already promised, but I’ve seen too much.” His eyes were suddenly distant and haunted.
“I’ve seen too much,” he repeated after a moment of silence. “The Republic is not what it was meant to be. I don’t know where we went astray, but I fear it was long ago. Certainly long before the Secession. We were just blind.”
“Did you miss Antonius?” Damien asked sharply. “LMID killed a hundred thousand people there.”
There was a new edge to the silence for a moment as the three ex-LMID officers half-glared at him.
“Yes,” De Santis conceded. “And that was too much, even for us, but remember: so far as we were concerned, we were at war. Perhaps those of us with shreds of a conscience should have thought that through, but we were deep in the heart of the echo chamber.”
Damien let that hang.
“Do you have the intelligence we wanted?” Niska demanded.
“I do,” the intelligence officer replied. “Tracking space traffic control for stuff people are trying to hide is my job, after all.” He snorted. “Found your shuttle’s insertion, by the way. It was well done. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I never would have seen it.”
“And?” Damien asked.
“Well, the records now show that it was flagged as a problem, investigated, and IDed as a systems problem on the shuttle that has been resolved,” De Santis told him. “It may not hold forever, but it will hold until we’re all long gone.
“As for your freighter, she was New Orleans Delight, chartered to Amber.” He shook his head. “From the files I saw, she’s an RID ship and has been for a decade. Used for covert and overt personnel and cargo transfer.
“The trip you’re looking for was in cold storage. Requesting it had a risk of drawing attention we didn’t want, so I tried something else first: I looked to see when Delight had visited that wasn’t in cold storage.”
“And?” Damien asked.
“She hasn’t been to Nueva Bolivia in about six months,” De Santis told them. “Before that, she swung through about every six to ten weeks. Came into orbit, dropped off her official cargo, left.”
De Santis unrolled a smart-paper flimsy onto the table and dropped an image onto it. It was a two-dimensional representation of the Nueva Bolivia System, with green lines drawn on it.
“These are the six courses that are in live storage,” he told them. “They all come in from different systems. They all end in Sucre orbit. And they are all coming in from odd emergence points.”
“I guess you work traffic control,” Niska said. “You’d see that. What are you saying?”
“They’re all passing through the same orbital slot,” Damien told the old Augment. He had been a pilot and a Jump Mage first, after all. He could pick up that pattern.
“Exactly.” A curving thick orange line appeared on the flimsy. “There isn’t supposed to be anything in that orbital slot, it’s pretty far out…but an unassisted orbit at that distance would be moving at exactly that speed. Delight kept rendezvousing with somebody out there.”
“We can project forward, see where it should be,” Damien concluded. “That’s more of a lead than I expected.”
“Unfortunately, we may need to move faster than any of us would like,” Jezek said quietly. “After talking to Connor last night, I poked at our records on the Mage Academies on Sucre today. I hit a bunch of data roadblocks and ended up called into my boss’s office.”
The dark-skinned man shook his head.
“I think I may have attracted the exact attention Connor was trying to avoid by not digging into cold storage, but…there’s nothing in our data files on the Academies. Five hundred teenage Mages? We should have them under constant surveillance—and we don’t.”
“If you’ve drawn attention, then we need to move sooner,” Niska said sharply. “You said our shuttle is covered?”
“For now,” De Santis confirmed.
“I don’t think I’ve drawn enough attention to get followed or anything of the sort,” Jezek pointed out. “But I’ve flagged enough that when I disappear, questions are going to get asked.”
“Either way, the faster we move, the better, I think,” Damien told them. “If there are no Mages in the Academies here, either, then we need to check out this space station ASAP. We should move.”
And it certainly didn’t reduce his urgency that the known number of missing teenage Mages had just quadrupled on him.
33
“This is a nice shuttle, but I’ll admit I’m wondering just how you plan to leave the system,” De Santis said dryly several hours later.
Damien ignored the man, his focus over Kelzin’s shoulder as the pilot weaved them through the orderly chaos of the traffic routes leaving Sucre orbit.
“Not on this ship,” Niska said bluntly. “Right now, however, it looks like this shuttle might be our best plan to check out the station.”
“I’ve got a course filed and everything,” Mike Kelzin confirmed cheerfully. “I’m a little surprised that it didn’t flag as a no-fly zone or anything like that.”
“They might not want to draw that much attention to it,” Damien told them. “Or we could be missing something.”
“I’m just a jarhead,” Romanov said dryly, “but I looked at the same numbers as all of you. Unless I’m misreading it, we’re not exactly on an intercept course, are we?”
“We should pass by five light-seconds away,” Kelzin agreed. “That’s more than close enough for us to detect a space station. You can’t hide anything in space at that range without magic.”
“And even with magic, it’s hard,” Damien noted. “At that range, I’d trust a Hand to do it. Probably no one else.”
The spells that could conceal a ship’s heat signature were only so good, after all, and the energy still had to go somewhere.
“So, they can’t hide from us, and that course looks like it’s heading toward one of the larger refining facilities in the asteroid belt,” Kelzin continued. “Unless our personnel transport company ID has been flagged by someone, that shouldn’t raise questions.”
“Even if it was, we search the ships we think are trying to smuggle people on the way back,” De Santis pointed out. “We need to find the indentures who are violating their contracts for there to be a crime, after all.”
“So, we fly out being nice and non-suspicious and scout out the station from a distance,” Damien concluded. “There’s no point in bringing in the big guns until we know we have a target.”
“And…what kind of big guns do we have, again?” Jezek asked. “There are seven of us on this shuttle. Two Augments and two Mages, yes, but that seems…insufficient to assault a space station engaged in some kind of mass kidnapping.”
“We have other assets,” Damien assured him. He could tell the two new recruits, he supposed, since they were going to end up on Rhapsody regardless, but he was feeling paranoid.
The two seemed aboveboard, but this whole affair could easily be a trap. They’d find out in about sixteen hours, one way or another.
The shuttle was equipped for long-distance trips, but not overly well. By the time they were approaching the target point, everyone had retreated into their own individual corners of the spacecraft.
“We’re coming up on where we should be finding our ghost,” Mike Kelzin reported from the cockpit. “Our closest approach should be in about twenty minutes unless I bring the engines online, but…I’m hoping one of you lot sees something I don’t.”
With a tiny bit of magic, Damien took off the helmet he was wearing, leaving the system to automatically turn off the VR sleep program he’d been using. He’d set it to let Kelzin communicate with him but ignore everyone else.
He was getting tired of sharing cramped quarters with a bunch of LMID agents. Niska and O’Malley, at least, seemed completely dedicated to finding out just what was going on behind the scenes of the Republic, but they’d still helped fight the shadow war that had led them all here.
Regardless of their anger now, they’d helped build the very state that had kidnapped the children they were chasing. Over seven hundred kids gone. Most of the Republic’s systems had smaller Academies than Arsenault, but Legatus had five to Nueva Bolivia’s three.
Sword of Mars Page 20
