Sword of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “You follow that,” Damien ordered. He turned to study the beds and swallowed down a wave of nausea.

  “We’re going to follow the path of these damn roller beds and see where they took their victims,” he told them, the word slipping out unconsciously.

  The channel was deathly silent for several seconds.

  “Damien, I swear to you, by all that is holy, by all that I believe in, we did not know,” Niska told him. “No one here with you knew any of this.”

  “I know.” Damien stared blankly at a wall. “I know,” he conceded again.

  If he hadn’t been certain of that, Niska would already be dead.

  37

  The last transfer of beds, presumably with students in them, had never been cleaned up after. The people running the station had swapped the beds out with freshly made ones, probably by sheer habit and routine, but they hadn’t cleaned up the inevitable scuff marks left by rolling beds on unmaintained wheels.

  With Damien’s mage-light hovering in the air and Romanov’s flashlight trained on the scuffs, following the trail was easy. The corridors around them were blander than the ones in the school area of the station, more institutional.

  “Are the drones sweeping into the new areas?” he asked the Marine.

  “Yes, my lord. Two are sweeping ahead of us, but they’re hitting a lot more closed doors here,” Romanov told him.

  “Looks like a hospital,” Damien muttered.

  “I prefer my hospitals less abandoned,” his bodyguard replied. “This is…creepy.”

  Damien didn’t answer, but he did increase the energy he was feeding his light. As the light starkly lit up the corridors and doors, he shivered.

  No, that was not helping.

  “Here,” Romanov said as he suddenly stopped. “Looks like a bunch of them kept going, but this was where the first ones stopped.”

  Damien brought his light around to examine the door more closely. There were more scuff marks in front of it, rolling beds slowing and turned against the rotational pseudogravity of the station.

  The door itself looked like a hospital door. Metal with a frosted glass pane, a panel where a wrist-comp could rapidly download data on the patient.

  And a sign.

  Cryogenic Intake One.

  The door probably wasn’t even locked, but Damien vaporized it anyway. Flame and metal hung in the air, frozen in his magic as he regarded them flatly. The fragments cooled under his power and he tossed them aside, leaving the doorway empty.

  The sterile room beyond it wasn’t familiar to him, but he knew it would be familiar to Romanov. The Marine’s stony silence told him that.

  The reason Damien wasn’t familiar with it was that he’d been dying when his thaumic burnout coma had been stabilized and he’d been placed in partial cryo-stasis. Romanov had been the one to stand over the doctor while the risky process was completed.

  Six operating suites hung open, their built-in IVs and oxygen lines hanging limply against the wall. Empty tanks were neatly stacked against the wall, and Damien didn’t even need to look at them to know what they contained.

  Cryogenic freezing required specific chemicals to be added to the blood to even make it possible, let alone safe. It was a complete violation of medical ethics to apply it to any person who wasn’t already dying, because a notable percentage of the population had a fatal allergic reaction to the chemicals.

  “They rolled them in here and hooked them up to oxygen and a more measured anesthetic gas while they pumped the cryo chemicals into them,” Damien said onto the open channel as he walked into the room.

  “The kids would never have known anything was wrong,” he continued. There was only one actual cryo-stasis pod left in the room, an empty two-meter-long container still waiting to receive its precious cargo. “They wouldn’t have woken up. They went to sleep, probably after a day or two of regular-seeming classes to lower their stress levels, and then they were frozen before they woke.”

  “Why?” Niska demanded. “I’ve never seen this kind of mass cryofreezing outside of a fucking war zone.”

  “Captain Rice had,” Damien said in a very cold, very flat tone. He knew he was burying his emotions and he’d pay for it later, but he needed to focus now. “It was one of the advantages the Blue Star Syndicate had over their rivals. They had the gear to move into a system, sweep the cities for the vulnerable and weak, kidnap or convince them to sign up for sex work, then cryo-freeze them and move them to other systems where the demand was higher.”

  Modern slavery, after all, was almost never about labor. It was about power and sex—and the Blue Star Syndicate had been eager to provide whatever their clients would pay for.

  Damien had never regretted killing the Syndicate’s leader. Right now, part of him was wishing he could have made it more painful.

  “There is no way that the Republic was selling these kids into slavery, Montgomery,” Niska replied. “I can’t assume we were above that anymore, but there’d be no point—and these were Mages.”

  “No,” Damien agreed. “They were frozen for transport. For ease of movement. But…they got them here easily enough. Why move them further?”

  “Because then they moved them to Legatus,” O’Malley said, her voice very quiet. “They needed an extra separation. People would wonder why Mages were going to Legatus. It would raise questions—the Republic wouldn’t want more Mages at their capital.

  “Nueva Bolivia, though?” She hissed. “No one would pay that much attention. Nueva Bolivia did well over the years by being worse than Legatus but never drawing as much attention as the biggest UnArcana World.

  “So, they brought the kids from all over the Republic to here…and here, they froze them and moved them to Legatus.”

  “We’re running out of answers, O’Malley,” Damien snapped. “So, what, every Mage in the Republic was brought here for processing?”

  “That’s what it looks like,” the Augment replied. “Thousands of kids. This wasn’t murder… It was something else.”

  “We need to know what.”

  “I might have some answers,” LaMonte’s voice interjected, sounding very, very tired. “They did a good job of wiping the computers, but I got a few useful tidbits…including what looks like the Director’s final report.

  “I’m transferring it to all of your systems. I suggest you find a place to sit down before you play it. I’m digging for more, but…”

  There was pain in LaMonte’s voice and it wasn’t physical.

  “You need to see this, Damien,” she said in a half-whisper.

  Somehow, Damien knew he didn’t want to be sitting in the cryo-prep suite when he saw the file LaMonte had found. He and Romanov retreated to the main lounge of the dorm, and he took a seat in one of the couches.

  His vac-suit could interface with his wrist-comp to put a hologram in front of him. Activating that, he loaded in LaMonte’s file with a verbal command and started it.

  The man who appeared in front of him looked like he wasn’t much taller than Damien himself. He was a squat, heavily muscled man with a shaven head and a white lab uniform. There were no insignia or name labels or anything on the uniform.

  The stranger had been standing behind a desk when he recorded the hologram, and he leaned against it and smiled.

  “This is Director James Paulson,” he said calmly. “This will be the final progress report for Project Prometheus’s Nueva Bolivian facility.

  “The last phase of subjects has completed cryo-prep. I have confirmed with the sourcing teams that there are no further waves of subjects en route, so I will be commencing the cleanup protocols. This will be the final message sent by the Link aboard Prometheus Station Nueva Bolivia.”

  Paulson paused, seeming to marshal his thoughts.

  “As the head of Prometheus Station Nueva Bolivia, I’m not sure I agree with the decision to concentrate production at the Centurion facility, but I understand the logic. We will no longer have the supply of juvenile su
bjects we’ve been working through, and removing the cryo-stasis from the process removes that wastage factor.

  “Our average ratio has been one point two percent,” Paulson said calmly, as if he was talking about damaged microwaves, not dead teenagers. “I understand that Dr. Finley has brought the final wastage down under three percent, so even with transport, we are ahead of where we were when Finley was operating here.

  “The final shipment will be one hundred and sixty subjects. While I presume Project Prometheus has plans for future supplies of subjects, that is the end of our internal sourcing.”

  The Director paused again.

  “I will be exercising my termination authority under the cleanup protocols for a number of the staff; information to be attached to this message. Several of the teachers, especially, seem to have suffered significant erosion to their commitment to the project’s goals.

  “This has been a difficult project for us all, but the individuals listed represent a potential threat to Prometheus’s security. The remaining two hundred and eighteen members of the Nueva Bolivian Station’s staff will relocate to the Centurion Facility.”

  Paulson smiled.

  “I hope you have room for us,” he concluded. “We are eager to continue our work in helping protect the Republic.

  “Director Paulson, out.”

  The recording froze and Damien sighed.

  “Kelly?” he asked.

  “Our data access was limited to what was in active memory when Paulson wiped the computers,” she told him. “The message he’d just sent. A recent map.”

  “And his termination list?”

  “We got it. I sent Niska to check out the quarters of the couple I could locate.”

  “And I’m there,” the Augment told them.

  The cyborg spy sounded very, very old.

  “That doesn’t sound like good news,” Damien pointed out.

  “I don’t know if Paulson did it himself or sent someone else to take care of it, but the quarters were hermetically sealed,” Niska said. “We cut the doors open, but the seal had mummified the body.”

  “That’s what I expected,” Damien admitted.

  “Shot in the head, short range.” Niska sighed. “All the hallmarks of an Augment assassin, as if my cohorts needed more blood on their hands.”

  “Fuck.” Damien swallowed. “What about this Finley?” he asked. “Do we have any idea where they were working on the station?”

  “There’s a sealed area on the map I found, marked as blocked under a Colonel Samuel Finley’s authority,” LaMonte told him. “It’s near you.”

  “Flash me and Romanov a waypoint,” he ordered. “If they wanted to hide it even here, I want to see it.”

  38

  The last thing Damien was expecting to find on a Republican station—a pre-Republican station, really—dedicated to some horrifying project involving thousands of teenage Mages was a runic defense.

  Years of practice, however, meant that he scanned a wall for the energy signatures only a Rune Wright could see before slicing into the space Finley had sealed.

  “Wait, what the hell?” he demanded aloud.

  “My lord?” Romanov asked.

  “There’s a runic shield on the interior of the wall,” Damien said slowly. He stepped carefully along the wall, running his fingers along the metal and studying the magic. “If I cut the wall open with magic—or with vibroblades, for that matter—it’ll explode.

  “There’s got to be a door that’s been flagged to check for a token.”

  “It’s also possible that it was just sealed to explode no matter what,” Romanov pointed out. “Wait…could you teleport through it?”

  Damien studied the magic as best as he could through the wall.

  “Yes, it couldn’t check for a token when teleporting into the space, so that has to be safe.” A chill of familiarity ran down his spine. “How did you know that, Denis?”

  “Asimov, my lord,” the Marine replied. “The defense on Kay’s apartment.”

  Kay had been an ex-Keeper, an agent of some kind of conspiracy inside the government of the Protectorate. He’d been involved in wiping out the rest of the surviving membership of the Royal Order of the Keepers of Secrets and Oaths, using a squad of borrowed Legatan Augments to do it.

  The magic on Kay’s apartment had been near-unique in Damien’s experience, a complex spell designed to counteract the capabilities of Hands and other powerful Mages.

  But the shield here was identical; and that suggested…

  “It’s the same shield,” Damien breathed. “What the hell was a Keeper Mage doing here?”

  “I don’t know,” Romanov said grimly. “But I think the answer is on the other side of that runic shield, my lord.”

  “Stay here,” Damien ordered. This station was getting creepier by the second. He studied the wall for a few key seconds, then stepped.

  Damien appeared inside the lab. Teleporting inside a rotating station, however, had thrown off his mental calculation for the short jump, and he appeared about twenty centimeters in the air and ended up face first on the metal floor.

  Groaning, he rose to his knees and studied the walls. Like the rune matrix in Kay’s apartment on Mars, it was designed to explode if severed—but there were always weaknesses a Rune Wright could find that someone writing code in Martian Runic wouldn’t see.

  He cut the matrix, exhaling as its energy drained off. Once that was done, he slashed open a door for Romanov and struggled to his feet to look around.

  Other than the runes, there was nothing to make him think this was a Mage’s facility. The room he’d stepped into looked like any general practitioner’s office on any world he’d visited. There was a mock skeleton, pictures of the brain, cupboards, a screen to link to the doctor’s wrist-comp.

  Dismissing all of that, Damien pushed through a door and into the rest of the space. Even more than the rest of the facility, this space gave off a massive sense of research institute. The runes continued along the wall as he studied the space.

  There were operating tables with dozens of cameras pointed at them. Holographic projectors that would once have held models of whatever the researchers were working on. A large-scale 3-D printer in the corner.

  No answers. Just a sterile, neatly cleaned-up and put-away lab that someone had sealed behind a spell that could have destroyed the entire station.

  “There’s another sealed unit back there,” Romanov noted. “Given the security, why would they have sealed a second layer?”

  Damien crossed the lab and checked his map. The closed-off room that Romanov had indicated was next to a set of double doors close to where the cryo-prep suites had been. At some point, a subject could have been rolled down here and into that section of the closed lab.

  He blew the double doors open almost absently as he turned to the remaining sealed unit.

  “Enough space for half a dozen operating rooms in there,” Romanov said quietly. “Is it sealed magically?”

  “No,” Damien replied after checking. “Though…” He paused and stepped up to the door, running his finger along what should have been the seam.

  “They welded it shut. Paranoid much?”

  “Not paranoid enough?” Romanov asked.

  “Not paranoid enough,” Damien agreed. He stepped back and obliterated the doors. Stepping into the debris, he found six…somethings. They weren’t operating rooms, though they definitely had the equipment for them.

  There were operating table–like structures. Cryo-chemical IVs. Oxygen. Everything that had been in the cryo-prep chambers…except…

  There were two sets of IVs at each section. One positioned for the usual wrist insertion and the other…around the neck?

  “Those are preset saws,” Romanov said in a sick voice, and pointed. “What the hell?”

  Damien followed the Marine’s pointing gauntlet and approached the table. The Marine was right. There was a set of saw blades attached to the table, in a set t
hat would neatly close around the top of someone’s skull.

  A second piece of equipment was clearly intended to hold some kind of canister.

  The full realization of just what he was looking at finally struck Damien, and he struggled away to throw up.

  “Damien?” LaMonte asked in a desperate tone. “Damien, what the hell are you looking at?”

  “It’s a brain extraction facility,” he said quietly, trying to activate the systems to clean the inside of his helmet before he threw up again. “They murdered the kids and pulled their brains out. There are life support canisters here; presumably, they had some kind of brain implant to interface with the canister systems and keep the brains alive.”

  “Dr. Finley’s mysterious process,” Niska said, the Augment’s voice slow and careful. “My god. But why? What the hell would they be doing with Mage brains?”

  “I don’t know,” Damien said, letting his cold anger suffuse his voice as he gave up and used magic to clean the inside of his vac-suit. “But there was a facility at Centurion, Niska. At the fucking heart of your fucking Republic. The kids were taken there, murdered and frozen alike.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Niska replied in a choking sob, and Damien realized he was hearing something he’d never heard before. The Augment was fighting against the same tears and rage as he was.

  “I don’t know, Damien Montgomery,” he finally said, his voice still trembling. “But there are only a handful of facilities at Centurion covert enough that they could have hidden this.

  “LaMonte and I will go over the data as we’re on our way. I will work out which one. We will find the answers, Damien. I know what Bryan Ricket died for now…and I swear to you, we will end it.”

  “On our way where?” O’Malley asked into the silence.

  “Legatus,” Damien and Niska replied simultaneously.

  39

  “That’s a lot of gunships. I’m not sure they’re bluffing this time, sir.”