Today the extra two in Sol meant that he could take over the Martian RTA for a personal call without worrying about disrupting communication for the entire system. The solutions that would allow that on a regular RTA didn’t work quite as well with the sheer volume of communication coming into Sol.
Those protocols would be in place on the Sherwood end of the call, with unconnected messages being directed to side chambers in the RTA and recorded. The Transceiver Mages who ran the RTAs knew more of everyone’s secrets than they were ever supposed to admit, but outside of them, even a recorded message was secure.
Claiming the primary chambers in two RTAs would be an expensive proposition for most people, but the Arrays were government property. Rank had its privileges—and since the responsibilities of that rank were why Damien had taken this long to make this call, he didn’t even feel guilty about leaning on them.
Much.
“We have a connection,” an unfamiliar voice echoed in the room. “Passing over to you, Admiral.”
“Thank you,” a very familiar female voice said. “Damien?”
“Grace, it’s me,” he replied. “How…how are things?”
He chuckled at the inanity of his own question. Grace McLaughlin was the commanding officer of an entire star system’s militia. Some of her “things” were in the reports that were hitting his inbox. The rest were often buried under her work.
“The star system is still here and my fleet is mostly repaired from our little excursion to Ardennes to save your cute butt,” Grace told him. “My folks and Granddad say hello. It was buried in a slew of other concerned questions, but that’s really the only important bit that won’t make it by formal channels.”
Grace’s “Granddad” was Miles James McLaughlin, the elected Governor of Sherwood. Her parents were major figures in the planetary government, positions earned on the back of competence and dedication to service as well as their family’s position as one of Sherwood’s major Mage families.
Like most Protectorate worlds, Sherwood’s Mages held to their privileges carefully. In Damien’s experience, at least, most of Sherwood’s Mages did so by making sure they earned those privileges with service.
That part wasn’t as universal.
“I’m glad to hear the planet is still there,” he told his lover. “I might not get back there much, but it’s still home.”
There was a pause. The only thing the RTA was transmitting was the voice of a Mage—tests suggested that it wasn’t even the sound of the Mage speaking so much as the intent, too. The Link and its ability to send digital information and video was going to be a game-changer for the Protectorate’s interstellar coms.
“Obviously, I know the news from Mars,” Grace finally said. “It seems you’ve been literally chained to the job, from what my research says about symbols of the job. How are you doing?”
“Desmond was a mentor. Des was a friend,” Damien said, then sighed. “I’ve buried enough of both, but I’m not looking forward to tomorrow.”
“The funeral?”
“Yeah. The funeral of a Mage-King is a grand affair these days, in a way I don’t think any of them would actually want.”
“A funeral is for the living, not the dead,” Grace reminded him gently. “I guess it was pushed out to let people make it to Sol in time?”
“I get to meet at least six Governors tomorrow, yeah,” Damien confirmed. “I hope no one expects me to remember their names. Burying the Desmonds is going to be more than enough to remember for one day.”
“You have staff to remember names now, I hope,” she told him. “Has the Professor caught up yet?”
“His ship just jumped into Sol,” he replied. “Christoffsen will be joining me this evening, and I have missed his sage advice. God knows I didn’t ask for this.”
“But He knows you don’t have it in you to say no,” his girlfriend reminded him. “I’m guessing the Lord Regent doesn’t get many vacations?”
“I can’t leave Sol until I give this chain back,” Damien confessed. “I…” He sighed. “I’m sorry, Grace; we knew this would be hard, but I expected to at least be able to swing through Sherwood once or twice a year.”
They were far from the first people whose careers had dragged them apart.
“Then it falls to me to make sure I make it to Sol once or twice a year,” Grace said firmly. “The reason we were mostly counting on you to come to me was that you were never going to be in one place as a Hand. If you can’t leave Sol, well, I know where to find you, don’t I?”
Damien chuckled.
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he admitted. “I’m sorry, my love.”
“Mmm,” she purred. “Say that last bit again?”
“I’m sorry?” he repeated, confused.
“No, the very last bit,” she told him.
“My love,” Damien echoed, smiling. “Right, sorry, I’m an idiot.”
“I’ve known that for a long time, Damien Montgomery,” Grace said. “But you’re my idiot. Kiera can borrow you to be her Lord Regent, but you’re my Damien. My idiot. My love.”
He bowed his head, knowing she couldn’t see him.
“I can live with that,” he said.
“You’d better. Last time I checked, I had a battle fleet.”
The entire Sherwood Interstellar Patrol would barely blip as a threat against Mars’s defenses, even without the Olympus Amplifier—but that wasn’t the point.
“Thank you,” he murmured. “I’ve had the job for a week and it’s probably been the busiest and most overwhelming week of my life.”
“I seem to recall one week spent swinging back and forth between Sherwood and Míngliàng to stave off a civil war,” Grace pointed out. “There’s at least no assassins and massive space battles?”
“Yet,” Damien said. “I’m actually flying out to the research station with the Link after this. That’s a mirror of the flight where Desmond died, so you would not believe the security in play.”
“It better be more than I would expect,” she told him. “I’m not losing you, Damien. We’ve come too close a time or two already.”
“I don’t think being Lord Regent has the same threat level,” he admitted. “I’ll be here when you can make it out.”
“Good. I want to see you, and not just in a recording.”
“That’s one of the other things I’ll be talking to people about at the research station,” he told her. “We need the Link everywhere. Live interstellar data transmission in a device the size of a refrigerator? Yes, please.”
“I look forward to it. I’ll try and let you know when I can make it out to Sol—and I’ll try and do it soon. We’re about to have the final tranche of the frigates come online, and I think we’re better off if I’m here for that.”
Damien doubted that the fourth tranche of Sherwood’s homebuilt warships was going to be the final one they built. If the McLaughlin hadn’t already had potential buyers knocking on his door, the Flotilla’s performance at the Battle of Ardennes would have brought them out of the woodwork.
“Bringing six new ships into service does rather need the Admiral, doesn’t it?” he asked. “I’ll be here when you come,” he repeated. “I look forward to seeing you, but I had to talk to you.”
“I figured.” There was a pause. “Are you okay?” she finally asked.
“No,” he admitted. “I’m not even sure I will be. But I’m upright and functional and doing the job, and that’s enough to keep me going most days. I won’t fail Desmond. I took the chain to stand in for Kiera until she’s nineteen. I won’t fail her, either.”
“I know. I just hope it doesn’t kill you. A lot of people would have their eye on that throne, that chain.”
“I don’t know why,” Damien told her. “Too much responsibility for me. I just didn’t have it in me to say no.”
“And all of that is why you’re going to be a good Lord Regent,” his girlfriend replied. “I wish I could support you more, but I ha
ve my own responsibilities here. I can’t leave them.”
“And I wouldn’t want you to,” he said. “Sherwood needs you.”
“The Protectorate needs you,” Grace replied. “I knew what I was getting into when I said I wanted to make this work, Damien Montgomery, and in some ways, this makes it easier. Like I said, I know where to find you now!”
He chuckled.
“That’s an improvement, I guess. I’ll keep that perk in mind as I keep going.”
“I know you will,” she said. “I love you, Damien Montgomery. But I always knew that part of what I loved you for was going to drag you away from me. We work around that. We have to.”
“Thank you,” he repeated softly. “I love you too, Grace.”
23
Damien spent the entire flight up from Olympus Mons to Research Station Deimos-Three tensed, half-expecting trouble and with an escape teleport spell ready and fluttering around him and his companions.
It was all unnecessary in the end, but he was still glad Kiera hadn’t even argued against her remaining on the surface.
“Welcome aboard Deimos Station,” a white-suited woman greeted him as he stepped off the shuttle. Two armored Royal Guard flanked her, having already checked the landing bay for dangers.
“Dr. Yu,” Damien greeted her with a nod. Yu Yaling was the administrative head of the Research Station, responsible for organizing a somewhat eclectic array of projects for the Protectorate.
Deimos wasn’t a military research station, though research from there had ended up in warships from time to time. It was explicitly a non-magical research facility, which occasionally ended up with it getting deprioritized.
“The Link has been set up and is waiting for you in the conference room,” Yu told him. “Is there anything else you need while you’re here?”
“I don’t have a lot of time, but if you can pull the team leads working on duplicating the Link into a meeting before I leave, I’d appreciate it,” Damien asked.
He suspected his softly spoken request would be taken as an ironclad order, which was fine by him.
“I’ll see what I can arrange,” the tall woman in the white suit told him. “This way, my lord.”
Legatus was over a dozen light-years from Mars. Damien wasn’t even entirely certain that Second Fleet was still at Legatus, for that matter. Alexander had full authority to wage the war as she saw fit, and if she’d moved the bulk of her fleet or her flagship from the occupied Republic capital, that was within her authority.
Damien would probably know about it, but he wouldn’t have argued it.
Despite the distance, the image of the friend and ally he’d left behind a few weeks earlier was crisp and clear. Legatus was closer than Sherwood, but that was irrelevant for either system so far as Damien could tell.
“Admiral Alexander,” he greeted her after confirming he was in the camera’s field of view and his image was being transmitted back. “I just spent a chunk of my afternoon in an RTA. This is very different.”
She smiled and nodded.
“Agreed. How’s Mars, my Lord Regent?”
“Heavy with responsibility,” Damien admitted, then tapped the gold links of the chain around his neck. “The chain is heavier than it looks, and it doesn’t even look light.”
“I was the heir for most of my life, Damien,” she reminded him. “I understand completely. I’m glad to have escaped the responsibility for now, even if I’m the heir again until Kiera finds a partner.”
Damien blinked as that jarred a memory loose.
“Right, I need to talk to Dr. Gunther,” he admitted. “She apparently was already poking Kiera on that, which means I need to remind her that Kiera is sixteen.”
“You know Dr. Gunther will then point out that having a second family line of Rune Wrights to hand would be very useful,” Alexander warned him. “It would be to everyone’s advantage to have some little Damiens running around.”
“Desmond never harassed me about that, and I’m not going to rush that on anyone’s account,” Damien countered.
“My brother valued the autonomy of the people around him more highly than was perhaps wise,” Jane Alexander said quietly. “Bodily and otherwise. No, it’s not morally right to push you and Grace to have children. But the Protectorate needs you to.”
“There are a lot of things I’ll do for the Protectorate, but that’s not on the list,” he said calmly. “If and when Grace wants to discuss that, we will. Until then, getting on my back is pointless—and getting on Kiera’s is actively dangerous.”
“Fair enough,” the Admiral allowed, but her tone suggested that the conversation wasn’t done. “This was supposed to be a military briefing, anyway. Will Kiera be seeing this?”
“A recording of it, yes,” Damien confirmed. “And Gregory and whoever else we get on the Regency Council that I’m supposed to have assembled in, oh, three days.”
Fortunately, it was actively unwise for Damien to be picking the rest of the Regency Council. Gregory was making the selections and running them by Kiera. The Chancellor had given Damien a veto on the candidates—none of the three of them were pretending they didn’t want a Regency Council that was going to follow where Gregory and Damien led—but Damien had declined to do more than glance at the names.
He didn’t recognize any of them from his mental list of enemies. That was enough.
“I see we’re keeping you busy,” Alexander replied.
“A hundred star systems, five of them still UnArcana Stars despite the Republic’s secession,” Damien replied. “They’ve, ah, a few questions that need to be answered.”
The humor faded as both of them considered why Damien was answering those questions. The death of the two Desmonds was a black cloud hanging over every conversation Damien had.
“Right.” Alexander considered the situation, then shrugged.
“Thanks to you convincing the Legatan government to surrender, we have several intelligence windfalls over the last week,” she noted. “The biggest is we now know how many warships were built in Legatus and how many warships were in commission in the RIN.”
“If that number is different, I’m concerned,” Damien admitted. Legatus had the only site the Protectorate was aware of that had produced and installed the Promethean Interfaces with their murdered Mage brains.
If the Republican Interstellar Navy had more ships than had been built in Legatus, Damien didn’t like what that suggested—and that Alexander was drawing the distinction meant…
“It’s different,” Alexander confirmed. “The RIN had thirteen carrier groups in commission prior to the final battle of the Siege of Legatus. That was eight Courageous-class ships and five smaller Bravado-class ships.
“Supporting them were twenty-nine battleships and a hundred cruisers. Almost all of that was at the Battle of Legatus, which means I’m not sure anyone knows how many hulls the RIN currently has in play.”
That was a hundred and forty-two capital ships…each of which had required six murdered Mages to fuel their “jump drives.” Damien had been conscious of how many children had been kidnapped and killed to build the Republic’s fleet, but that was still a stark figure.
“Eight hundred and fifty murders,” he said quietly.
“I know,” Alexander agreed. “The scary part is that the records here show that Legatus only built six of the Courageous ships and twenty-five battleships. The Bravados and cruisers were all built here, but that’s still six heavy capital ships I can’t source.”
“So, they have a second shipyard and a second Prometheus facility,” Damien concluded.
“Any record of that yard is gone,” the Admiral told him. “I can tell you the name of every carrier in the Republic fleet, but I can’t tell you where they were built. The shipbuilding records we have are from the yards themselves where the commissioning lists were retrieved on Legatus.”
“So, they might have been hoping that we wouldn’t realize there was a second yard,” he sai
d. “We’d have realized soon enough when they kept reinforcing.”
“Agreed. That means my priority is finding that yard,” Alexander told him. “There’s hints through the documents and interrogations of a secondary command-and-control center, but no one knows where.
“What I am certain of is that we’re looking at a second accelerator ring.”
Damien nodded slowly.
The Centurion Accelerator Ring had been a forty-year, incomprehensibly expensive project, wrapping a particle accelerator around the full circumference of the gas giant it was named for. Fueled by cloudscoops pulling hydrogen from Centurion and feeding it right into fusion power plants, the accelerator had provided a technological solution to mass production of antimatter.
“That was our biggest fear,” he noted.
“And now I know it exists,” Alexander told him. “I just don’t know where.”
“Their fleet came apart pretty badly at Legatus,” Damien noted. He’d challenged the RIN on the source of their jump drives, forcing them to take a good look at themselves and their ships.
That probably wouldn’t have been enough on its own, but it had turned out that the Promethean Interfaces were wired to nuclear safeties to make sure they weren’t tampered with. That had turned fear and confusion into hesitance—and a hard overreaction from the fleet commanders had turned hesitance into active desertion.
“I have to assume they’re going to reassemble all of it,” Alexander told him. “We’re beginning to scout Nueva Bolivia. If they’re still scattered and weak, we need to take advantage as fast as we can.”
“And we need to find that accelerator ring.”
“If you’ve got any more of those MISS stealth ships, I’ll take all of them I can get,” the Admiral replied. “Rhapsody in Purple is worth her weight in antimatter, but we’ve only got one of them. I’ve got Chambers and Kulkarni drafting up a pattern to use destroyers as best as we can, but the destroyers have to go through fast and distant to be safe.
Mountain of Mars Page 13
