Mountain of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “She’s a Gorgon-Six high-altitude multipurpose deployment drone,” the Secret Service Agent on the other end of the communicator told him. “Thirty-eight tons, ten-meter wingspan, ASI brain. Capable of deploying everything from high-altitude attack missiles to weather drones and survey probes.

  “There’s about fifty of them on the planet, and every damn one of them belongs to Mars Defense Command. And they mostly get used for those weather drones.”

  “So, is this a Gorgon-Six or one of MDC’s Gorgon-Sixes?” Denis asked. There were too many interfacing organizations on Mars. Olympus Mons Defense Command controlled the security of the Mountain and was considered coequal to Mars Defense Command and Mars Orbital Command.

  OMDC was under the authority of the Royal Guard and reported directly to the Mage-King. MDC was a Marine Corps-led organization and MOC was a Navy-led structure.

  He didn’t think the Marines would have tried to assassinate Damien Montgomery, but it had been a weird few years.

  “MDC is pulling inventory now,” a new voice cut into the channel. Denis felt his spine stiffen at the sound of General Spader’s sharp tones. “They may or may not come up short. It’s highly likely, though, that we’re looking at new manufacture—given that the shuttle was leaving Avalon Automated Aircraft’s primary production facility.”

  “Is someone checking it out?” Denis asked. He wasn’t entirely sure why the General of the Royal Guard was the one updating him on this, but he’d treat it like this was normal until she told him why.

  “There’s an MISS team on its way,” she told him. The emphasis on the second S was audible—and probably critical.

  MIS were the Martian Investigation Service. They were the Martian planetary police and the Protectorate’s interstellar police agency.

  MISS was the Martian Interstellar Security Service. They were spies and covert-operations specialists. An MISS team on Mars itself was a counterintelligence team with the skills, codes and authority to tear open AAA’s computers and find all of the company’s secrets.

  “We’ll keep investigating here,” he told Spader. “We’ll probably hand it over to a team of proper analysts in short order. The site seems secure and it doesn’t look like anyone is sending a team of killbots to protect the wreck.”

  “You jest, Lieutenant, but I wouldn’t have expected someone to send attack drones at the Lord Regent. We’re going to get some damn answers.”

  And that, of course, was why the General of the Royal Guard was on Denis’s com. Denis technically still commanded the Lord Regent’s personal detail—his tasking as Samara’s support was a part of that role because Damien Montgomery had always used his bodyguards as a personal strike team—but General Spader was also responsible for Montgomery’s security.

  This attack was a direct strike at everything she was sworn to protect.

  “Agreed, sir,” he told her. “We might find a black box or something here.”

  “Listen to Samara, Lieutenant,” the General told him. “I’m not going to pretend I don’t know she’s there, after all. She’s probably not the best investigator MIS has produced, but she’s up there and she’s on the site.”

  Denis was glad the armor concealed his momentarily distressed flush. That was the other reason why his assignment to Samara was unofficial. Montgomery hadn’t briefed the Guard’s commanding officer on his investigation.

  “And while I’m talking to you about Samara on an encrypted black line that now only has the two of us on it,” the General said with a chuckle, “you want to check out Apollo-Six Seventy-Five.”

  That was…an address inside the Mountain. One down near the geothermal power plants.

  “Sir?” Denis asked questioningly.

  “It’s a secured location; as a Guard officer, you have access,” she told him. “I know nothing about why Samara is in the Mountain, but I suspect what you’ll find there might come in handy.

  “Keep me in the loop on what you find at the wreck,” she continued swiftly, as if she hadn’t even mentioned the location. “I’m coordinating this whole mess and running it through the OMDC’s encrypted network.

  “If someone has hacked that, heads are going to fucking roll.”

  “Here, Romanov, can you lift this,” Samara requested.

  Denis looked at the chunk of armor that the Inspector was trying to look under and gestured slightly. It lifted smoothly into the air, and he placed it carefully to the side of the wreck.

  “Well, I was thinking with the armor, but that works,” the Voice told him with a smile. “Thanks.”

  The debris had apparently been covering what remained of the aircraft’s Artificial Sequential Intelligence—an ASI or “artificial stupid.” Denis couldn’t make much of the collection of electronics, but he could recognize that much from the standardized casing.

  Moving the debris had been easy—even easier than usual. Montgomery had managed to squeeze in the ten minutes necessary to “fit” a suit of Royal Guard armor to its wearer, adjusting the runic structure to fit the user.

  Denis had understood that the Royal Guard exosuit armor’s runes were simply an upgraded, more personally tailored version of the limited system in a Marine Combat Mage’s armor that allowed him to use the projector rune on his right palm easily despite the exosuit.

  He’d been wrong. From what he could tell, the rune was a simpler version of the Runes of Power born by the Hands and the Rune Wrights themselves. Without linking quite as intimately into his power as the runes carved into the Hands’ flesh, it could never have been as powerful.

  But it was still an augmentation of his own power. The Royal Guard were selected for powerful personal magic, and Denis was no exception. Even with the runes on their armor, a single Royal Guard was no match for a Hand…but a match for anything weaker than a Hand.

  “Romanov, come take a look at this. How precisely can you do that?” Samara asked, gesturing at the piece of armor he’d moved.

  He carefully moved down next to her. Years of practice with exosuit armor allowed him to move through the debris without damaging anything, but he had much less confidence in his ability to poke at the drone’s electronic brain with powered gauntlets.

  “Sorry, Munira, I have no idea what I’m looking at,” he admitted after a moment. “I mean, this section over here is pretty standard aircraft and shuttle control systems, but once you reach this board…”

  “Thank you, I was only fifty percent sure what that section was,” Samara told him with a chuckle. “I know most of the key segments of an ASI, though. This one is very dead, in case you were worried.”

  “So long as it didn’t shoot at me, I was happy either way. What did you need?” he asked.

  “This section here is its active memory, its RAM,” Samara told him. “We need it intact. But the black box flight recorder is behind it—it’s designed to be accessed from the other side.”

  “Which is embedded in dirt that the crash has baked into ceramics,” Denis guessed.

  “Can you use magic to lift the RAM section without damaging it?” she asked. “It’s not normally fragile, but given the impacts it’s already taken…”

  He studied it. That wasn’t even a question of power.

  “I think so,” he admitted. “But maybe we should wait for specialists?”

  “Do you trust them?” Samara asked bluntly. “I want copies of all of this before I hand it over to the rest of OMDC. Montgomery’s paranoia is getting under my skin.”

  “He’s not paranoid,” Denis said. “Trust me. It’s my job to be paranoid for him, and he is definitely not paranoid enough.”

  She chuckled again, then disconnected several wires she’d linked into the RAM. He hadn’t noticed them before.

  “I have a copy of the RAM data,” she admitted. “There are contextual aspects I lose in copying, it’s not designed to be read like this, so we’re better off if we keep it intact. Plus, I don’t want to admit I have it.

  “But if we break it, we still
have options. So, open it up, Denis.”

  He studied the circuit board carefully. Tendrils of his magic slid under the board, supporting it while tiny jets of force severed the remaining connections. The circuitry slowly lifted up, sliding over to the side where Samara held up a static-protected electronic evidence bag.

  His magic slid the board gently into the bag and she closed it up.

  “There we go,” she told him as he exhaled a sigh. “One set of RAM chips, sealed up and put aside for the rest of MIS. Now the black box.”

  Looking past where he’d moved the circuit board, Denis could see that there was still a solid panel blocking them from anything else. Before Samara could even ask, he wove magic again. Safely opening a hole through an armor panel without damaging anything on the other side of it was easy, one of the first things the RMMC taught their Mages.

  That panel joined the armor on the dirt outside the wrecked aircraft, and the bright orange shape of the aircraft’s black box flight recorder came into view.

  “All right.” Samara knelt down next to it and produced wires again. “Of course, folks are going to know that somebody accessed the data, but that’s fine. The box can’t be edited; it’s one-write-only storage.”

  She connected the box to her wrist-comp and started a program. While it ran, she looked around the wreck.

  “Serial numbers were wiped,” she said aloud. “I was expecting that. We’ll see if they knew—or even considered—what they needed to do to the box.”

  A light flashed on her wrist-comp from the program, and she said something harsh in a language Denis thought was Arabic.

  “Well, they’re smarter than I hoped. The box is dead; the data connection was physically severed. Those RAM chips will tell us a lot, but with the serial numbers removed and the black box wiped, we’re back to physically tracking the plane.”

  “Looks like it came right from the factory,” Denis told her. “We’re still looking into it, but the shuttle launched from the manufacturer’s facility.”

  She nodded with a sigh.

  “They missed that there was no vulnerable window in Montgomery’s descent, but it looks like a lot of the work around that was clean,” she admitted. “This is going to be a mess, Denis. And it ties into our investigation as well, even if no one else is looking at the Mage-King’s death as an assassination yet.”

  “Sir!” Denis instinctively followed the indicators his suit gave him to turn to face the speaker, even as the message came by radio. “We found something weird; can you and the Inspector come take a look?”

  “They found something,” he told Samara. “Shall we?”

  “I need to review the data from the RAM, but I can’t do that here,” she told him. “Lead on, Denis.”

  As they were picking through the wreckage to get to the Guard who’d called Denis over, he realized he’d missed when Samara had started using his first name.

  “I have no idea what that is,” Denis admitted as he looked at the collection of circuitry modules hanging from the Secret Service Agent’s hands. The Royal Guard who’d called them over was standing back, seemingly worried their armor could break the artifact by looking at it.

  “I’m not sure either, sir,” the Agent admitted. “But we pulled schematics of the Gorgon-Six and it didn’t belong. It’s got a long-range radio, computer modules, all sorts of crap that the Gorgon already has elsewhere.”

  “Let me take a look,” Munira ordered. The Agent happily handed the harness-like device over to her. “Where was it?”

  “Attached to the main fire control data bus,” the Guard behind them told her. “It looked like it had been attached but the damage to the data bus had separated it.”

  “I think it’s a remote initiator,” Samara said after several seconds’ examination. “It received a radio transmission and turned the drone on, dumping a program into its computers.”

  “Well, that explains why something that was supposed to be turned off for shipping turned on,” Denis replied. “Doesn’t explain why they were fueled and armed, but…”

  “There was probably one of these inserted in each of the planes, most likely while something was arming and fueling them. Show me exactly where you found it,” she ordered.

  The Guard paused for a moment, then turned on a targeting laser and used it to indicate the spot. Samara knelt next to it, examining it.

  “The data bus didn’t break in the crash,” she concluded. “That was an explosion and I’m going to bet the source was jarred loose when the plane crashed. It wasn’t meant to take out the data bus.”

  She lifted the harness and studied it again.

  “It was meant to vaporize this thing and I think the reason why is this.” She tapped a module at the center of the harness.

  “There aren’t many chips in the galaxy that could hold a full ASI program for a drone like this in a size that’s insertable like this. This couldn’t run the ASI, but it could hold the code and dump it into the drone when it came online.”

  “Useful to find, I suppose,” Denis allowed.

  “More than you think,” Samara told him. “These kinds of chips aren’t made on Mars, Denis, and the Earth-based manufacturers I know are sold out three years in advance.

  “Getting your hands on chips like this is hard…unless you own the manufacturer or already have those government purchase contracts.”

  “Munira?” he said. “You’ve lost me.”

  “These are Legatan high-density data transfer chips, Denis,” she told him. “This harness was built in the Republic. I can’t be sure if it was specifically designed to override a Gorgon-Six, but its purpose was to take control of a drone combatant.”

  “And they had the coders on hand to make sure it was reset to go after Montgomery’s shuttle,” he concluded grimly. “That does flag a likely culprit, doesn’t it?”

  “They tried to bury it, but the op depended on a piece of tech they couldn’t source locally,” Samara agreed. “I’m not going to call it a solid case without more data, but I’d say this was the RID.”

  The Republic Intelligence Directorate was the intelligence and covert action arm of the Republic of Faith and Reason. Denis had known the RID had the Protectorate badly penetrated—defectors from LMID had helped them clean up the infestation, but they still had agents seemingly everywhere.

  “At least it gives us a name,” he said grimly.

  “For this, at least,” Samara confirmed. Putting the harness down and stepping back, she nodded firmly to the Agent who’d found it.

  “Well done,” she told him. “There should be MIS and MISS teams landing shortly, with a Marine security detail. You’ll all fall back to the Mountain at that point, but make certain the MIS and MISS teams know about the harness.”

  “Yes, my lady Voice.”

  She led Denis away with a jerk of her head.

  “We need to get back to the Mountain,” she told him. “This was a necessary diversion but, from the perspective of the main mission, not a wholly useful one.”

  “You don’t think it’s connected?” he asked.

  “Not if this was RID,” she said. “We might be seeing the same group borrowing resources—we know Nemesis had access to an LMID infiltration team when they were cleaning up the Keepers—but it doesn’t smell right.”

  “How so?”

  They were clear of the wreck now and no one else could hear them. Denis sent a signal up to call down their helicopter. Distant lights suggested more vehicles were on their way. They’d have to drive across fields, which gave them time.

  “Insufficient penetration,” Samara finally concluded. “Whoever went after the Mage-King had enough access in the Mountain to covertly remove their agent from the security systems. Even with a Hand’s override code, that shouldn’t be possible—and all I can find is that one of Hand Ndosi’s codes was used. Whoever cleaned that up was good.”

  She gestured back at the wreck.

  “These attackers didn’t even know that th
ey didn’t have a vulnerability window,” she told him. “They had resources and skills, but they didn’t have data. They didn’t have penetration of our systems or our security protocols.

  “Different modes of operation, different levels of access. Different attackers.” She shook her head. “And that means the RID is MISS’s problem and we, Denis, need to keep our eyes on the main target.”

  “Spader gave me a place to look,” he told Samara. “Just an address in the Mountain, but one apparently only officers of the Royal Guard can access.”

  He looked around the crash site as the helicopter touched down behind him.

  “After this, I’m not going to sleep anytime soon. Want to check it out?”

  “Spader isn’t supposed to know about our investigation,” Samara said coolly.

  “Spader is supposed to know everything that happens in the Mountain, and we’ve been poking at her systems,” Denis pointed out. “If she hasn’t guessed more than she even implied to me, I’d be surprised.

  “Not sure what she’s directing us to, but she is the General of the Royal Guard. It might be useful.”

  “I wasn’t saying we shouldn’t follow up,” Samara replied. “Just being twitchy about people who weren’t briefed knowing about my black investigation.”

  26

  Denis Romanov had spent enough time aboard ships that he had to keep himself from translating the “district” and “level” structure of addresses in Olympus Mons to “decks.”

  Apollo-Six Seventy-Five was Unit Seventy-Five, Level Six, of the Apollo District. The Apollo District, in turn consisted of the fifteen lowest levels in the Mountain. There were seventeen districts, with the top, Zeus, being mostly the Royal Family’s section.

  So, Apollo-Six was the sixth lowest level in the mountain. Apollo One through Four were entirely consumed by the geothermal power generation infrastructure that was the original purpose for the dug-out installation. The rest of Apollo—and a good chunk of Hephaestus, the next district up—was only mostly consumed by power-generation and -handling infrastructure.