Mountain of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  The geothermal plants were still at least a third of the power produced in the mountain, but there were multiple massive fusion plants as well. If you had the open spaces, there was nowhere better to stick a power plant of any kind than inside a few kilometers of solid rock.

  No one was sure now if the open spaces that made up the underground capital of the Protectorate had been blasted out by the Eugenicists or naturally occurring. None of the people who might have been able to answer that question had lived long enough to be asked questions about geology and architecture.

  The door at Apollo-Six Seventy-Five looked perfectly normal, but when Denis stepped up to it and tapped his wrist-comp to the entrance panel, it took several seconds for the system to process through his security credentials.

  When it finished interrogating his wrist-comp, the door slid open. It was far thicker than it looked from the outside. The regular-seeming door was heavily armored on the inside—and the space it allowed them into was empty, an antechamber with no visible exits except where they’d come in.

  The door slid shut behind them, leaving Denis and Samara alone in a space that was large enough to be comfortable and small enough to be disconcerting.

  A computerized voice spoke before Denis could be too bothered.

  “Guard credentials verified. Voice and bio identification required.”

  A panel slid open in the wall, revealing an automated DNA scanner. As Denis looked at the device in apprehension, it vented a gust of steam and extended a freshly sanitized needle.

  “This is weird, right?” Samara asked. “Or is this the normal process for entering a Guard facility?”

  “This is weird,” Denis confirmed. He put his hand in the scanner and forced himself to stoically endure the prick from the needle as it grabbed a drop of his blood.

  “Voice authentication is Denis Romanov,” he said aloud. He activated a program on his wrist-comp and looked at the phrase it popped up. “The sun rises over seven hills at the dawn of Rome.”

  Silence answered him for several seconds.

  “Secondary individual identified. Bio and voice identification required.”

  “Munira.” He gestured to her.

  He heard a small clatter as the DNA scanner discarded the needle it had used for him—the machine would automatically retrieve and sanitize its needles in an internal autoclave, but it would have between two and three hundred of the things, depending on the volume of use expected.

  “I am Munira Samara, Voice of the Mage-Queen of Mars,” she said firmly as she put her hand in the device. She winced at the pinprick.

  “Voice and bio identification recorded. Identity of Guard Lieutenant Denis Romanov verified. Identity of Voice Munira Samara provisionally accepted.”

  What had been seamlessly part of the wall a moment earlier slid apart, revealing a concealed exit wide enough for a Guard officer in the exosuit armor Denis had shed before heading down here.

  The other side was a security surveillance room. There was nothing different or unusual about it at all, except that it wasn’t on any of the maps or records Denis had seen.

  “Why would General Spader send us to a random security room?” Samara asked.

  “Because this one isn’t on the records anywhere and is secured behind a double layer of Guard-access-only security,” Denis said slowly. He took a seat at the computer and studied the screens.

  There were about forty of them and they were randomly shifting every ten seconds or so, showing locations from throughout the Mountain.

  “Unless I’m mistaken, this is shifting through every security camera in the Mountain,” he said quietly.

  The system promptly asked him for another layer of authentication when he tried to control the feeds, but accepted his Guard codes readily enough.

  A few seconds’ work locked the cameras on to the hangar bay where the Royal shuttles were maintained and prepared for duty.

  “You have the time stamps for the last maintenance on the Mage-King’s shuttle, I assume?” he asked.

  Samara gave them to him but was looking at the screens carefully. He was setting it up so each of the screens was starting from a different point of their time window, each roughly ten minutes apart.

  “The Guard is running a copy of every security feed here, aren’t they?” she asked softly.

  “Looks like,” he agreed. “An entirely separate backup.” He shivered. “At a guess, one that would refuse even Hand override codes. The security room might predate the Keepers’ fake attack on the Mountain, but I suspect we blocked out any ability of the Hands to control it after—”

  “Stop, there!”

  Samara was pointing at one of the screens. The time stamp said it was seventy-two minutes after the maintenance staff had left…but there was a man in a set of maintenance coveralls and holding a toolbox approaching the shuttle.

  “I watched the entirety of this footage from the security systems,” she told him. “Nobody entered the hangar.”

  “And according to this backup, this guy did,” Denis agreed. “I’ll see what I can pull for visuals. How much do you need for us to ID him?”

  “If he’s on Mars, get me thirty seconds of footage and I’ll have his address by morning.”

  27

  Olympus City had been started under domes when the Eugenicists ruled Mars and only spread out around the domes after the Mage-King took power. At every point in its existence from the very beginning, it had been built as a capital. The centerpoint of the road structure was the massive double doors of the formal main entrance into the Mountain itself, and immense boulevards stretched out in three directions from that center.

  One route went directly west from the main gate, aligned perfectly with the core tunnel the original geothermal machinery had been installed through. This was the Central Avenue—and the funeral started at the far end of it.

  Damien hadn’t been involved in any of the preparations for the massive public component of the funeral. He knew the final steps of the dance—they were the same for Hands who fell in the line of duty, and he’d buried Alaura Stealey, the Hand who recognized him as a Rune Wright, there.

  Marines led the way, perfectly marching ranks of blue dress uniforms glittering under the weak Martian sun. A Navy contingent followed, their ranks noticeably less perfect than the Marines.

  Others came after them, scattered contingents of the various branches of the Protectorate government representatives from half the worlds that paid allegiance to Mars—all who could send a formal delegation in time.

  Then the traditional black cars. Damien was in the third of the armored vehicles, watching an overhead view of the entire parade on a holographic projection.

  Kiera had argued to be in the same car as him, but General Spader had won. The cars were heavily armored and each was escorted by two Royal Guards walking alongside in exosuits, but they still couldn’t risk having the Lord Regent and the Mage-Queen in the same vehicle.

  She was in the second set of five cars, the ones following behind the two plain hearses at the heart of the parade. Those were followed by a solid block of fifty Royal Guard in the same full exosuit armor as the ones guarding the vehicles, and then more Marines.

  The parade was over a kilometer long and held at least a thousand Marines—and Damien had seen the security plans. There were ten thousand Marines positioned through the city around Central Avenue, with aircraft orbiting above the city and shuttles and warships higher up.

  They’d tried to minimize the impact the security would have on the people, but he knew it still hadn’t been easy for people to gather along the route…but gather along the route they had.

  Olympus City and the Mountain were home to millions of people, and he could have sworn they were all there to say goodbye to their King.

  “There was a point to an open car for Kiera,” he told Spader over the command net. “It would do people good to see her, I suspect.”

  “And how safe do you think she would be, M
ontgomery, exposed like that?” the Royal Guard commander asked. “Someone just threw a quarter-billion dollars of drones and missiles at you, and the only ID we’d got on them is ‘probably Republican.’ Our Crown Princess is now a ninety-year-old Admiral in the middle of fighting a war.

  “The people need to see Kiera Alexander, yes, but she needs to survive to take the crown and the Mountain in her own right. You seem a decent-enough man, Damien Montgomery, but I have no desire to attend your coronation.”

  Damien shivered.

  “I have even less desire to attend my coronation,” he told her. “I don’t disagree with you, General. I just wonder where we draw the line.”

  “Preferably? In pre-secured designated zones where she can give speeches but we know everyone is cleared.”

  “Like the one I’m speaking in shortly?” Damien asked. “Where’s she supposed to be while I’m giving my remarks?”

  “In one of the observation boxes set aside for VIPs,” Spader told him. “Transmuted transparent titanium. It’s secure and moderately visible.”

  “No, she needs to be with me,” the Lord Regent replied. “We can’t have her on the sidelines today, even if she’s not speaking.”

  Everyone, including Kiera, he suspected, would have preferred her to speak at her father and brother’s funeral. Unfortunately, even given prepared remarks, she’d simply broken into incoherent tears trying to practice.

  Damien didn’t blame her. He wanted to do the same, and the Desmonds hadn’t been his blood family.

  “The security is not set up for us to have the Mage-Queen on that stage,” Spader objected.

  “But it is set up for the Lord Regent,” Damien said dryly. “I’m aware I’m more expendable than she is, but I would expect much the same security.”

  “I dislike changing the plan on moving the Mage-Queen of Mars,” the Royal Guard’s commander told him.

  “I’ll check with her before I make it an order,” Damien told the woman, “but I suspect it’s happening. As for the plan changing? General, she’s sixteen. Get used to it.”

  That managed to get a snort of almost-humor from Spader as Damien linked to Kiera’s com.

  “Kiera, I want to make a last-minute change to the plans,” he told her. “I know you’re not feeling up to speaking, but I want you on the stage with me.”

  He paused, but she didn’t answer immediately.

  “It’s your call,” he reminded her. “Spader is focused on keeping you safe, but people need to see you. They need to know you—and we need people to remember that I speak for you, not myself.”

  “True,” she finally answered, her voice shaky with unshed tears. “It’s not easy, Damien.”

  “It’s not supposed to be, I don’t think,” he told her gently. “I’m not asking you to speak, Kiera—though I’ll yield the stage if you feel you can in the end—but I think you need to be there.”

  She exhaled a sigh that was half a sob. Even Damien was finding compartmentalizing his grief away hard today.

  “I’ll be there. My guards know the way?”

  “They will by the time we arrive,” he promised her. “I’ve got your back, kid. Always.”

  “I know. Thank you.”

  The stage was set up right in front of the main gates of the Mountain. The core procession would avoid those gates from there, wrapping around the side of Olympus Mons on a thirty-minute drive to a specific flank of the giant mountain.

  But this was also the end of the public part of the procession and the place for the public part of the remarks.

  Damien met Kiera halfway to the stage, inside a moving bubble of red-armored Guards. People were spotting the Mage-Queen, the young woman’s gold circlet distinctive even in a sea of black suits like hers, and pointing as she passed.

  The young Queen noticed and straightened her back. She was still crying, Damien knew, but she began to wave to the closer people on the other side of the security cordon.

  As they walked, the first of the four clergy scheduled to speak began the Kel Maleh Rachamim, the Jewish prayer of mourning. The rabbi would be followed by the bishop and imam of Olympus City, and then by the senior pujari of Olympus’s largest Hindi temple.

  The local senior priests of no less than seventeen religions had offered their services for the ceremony. The Vatican had even offered the unusual concession of allowing the Pope to leave Earth to perform the ceremony—without even requiring that Her Holiness be the only speaker.

  Instead, the Regency Council and Kiera had settled on the local leaders of the four largest religions. It was a simple, relatively rational selection that Damien could defend.

  Which was good, since he’d already had to and expected to do so again. And again.

  “Are you okay?” he whispered to Kiera as they walked forward together.

  “No,” she replied calmly, waving to a small child sitting on their parent’s shoulder. “All of this…it doesn’t feel like Dad. Or Des, for that matter.”

  “Your father understood the value of spectacle when required,” Damien said gently. “Des…Des I’ll give you.”

  Even through her barely contained tears, that got a small smile from his ward.

  “There’s no rush,” he reminded her as the rabbi concluded his prayer. “Three more prayers and we’ve only got fifteen meters to go.”

  “Are any of them going to be in English?” she asked as the second prayer starting, the bishop of Olympus City proclaiming the funeral mass in firm and measured Latin.

  “Nope,” Damien told her. They were through the crowd now and the door was sliding closed behind them. Even with the cordon, that had been the most vulnerable part of the journey, and they’d made it safely.

  “The imam will speak in Arabic and the pujari will speak in Hindi,” he continued. “Short of including ‘atheist’ on the list, the top four didn’t include anyone who does liturgy in English.”

  He’d had a moment of temptation to count all of the various non-Catholic Christian groups as one entity—that would have put them in the top four instead of the Jewish population of the city—but he’d realized that was bias from his own religious background.

  And there wasn’t a large-enough United Church population in Olympus City to have a United minister speaker speak for that combined group.

  The imam took over from the bishop as he and Kiera finally reached the green room next to the stage. More Royal Guards were waiting for them, as were four young men from the Mountain’s PR team with portable makeup trays and chairs.

  “Sit down, sit down,” one of them instructed. “We only have two minutes and we need to make sure you’ll look right in front of the cameras.”

  If there was one part of ruling the Protectorate Damien had never predicted, it was the makeup.

  28

  The cars came to a halt well short of the line of unmarked black basalt obelisks. The Royal Guard spread out first, securing the empty and secluded field against any potential threat.

  There wasn’t one. People only came there for events like this one. It wasn’t a secured zone, but it was rare for someone to want to look at the Fields of Sorrow.

  The evenly spaced black obelisks marked the edge of an immense mass grave. No one was sure how many children and youths the Eugenicists had raised, bred and murdered in their unholy quest to rebirth magic, but the Protectorate knew where their bodies were buried.

  Unnamed. Uncounted. But never forgotten.

  At the base of the fields, integrated into the obelisks that marked the lowest edge of the Fields of Sorrow, was the Black Mausoleum: a low-slung structure carved of the same basalt as the markers themselves.

  The Mausoleum held two hundred and fifty crypts. Eighty-seven held the rebels who had liberated Olympus Mons. Only nine of those had names: Eugenicist scientists and soldiers who had turned on the cult-like organization that had raised them, to fight for justice.

  The others only had pictures and the six-character designation that was all the child
ren of the Olympus Project had ever been allowed until DMA-651 had overthrown the Eugenicists and given himself the name Desmond Michael Alexander—and the title of Mage-King of Mars.

  He’d buried his friends there—and then he’d buried his Hands there. Then his Queen. And then, when that incredible and broken man had finally laid down his burdens, he’d been buried there.

  The Black Mausoleum held the Mage-Kings of Mars and their closest servants.

  A hundred and seventy of the crypts were claimed, though seventy-two of those were empty. Hands did not often die in places or ways that let family and King inter an actual body.

  Memory of Alaura Stealey’s funeral shivered down Damien’s spine, but even that paled to the duty laid on him today.

  “With me, Kiera,” he told the young Queen as he led the way to the first hearse.

  A young man and woman unknown to Damien were standing by the second hearse. Des’s spirit would be carried on his final journey by his friends. The empty coffin of the Mage-King of Mars would be carried by his heirs.

  The coffin slid out of the hearse with ease. Nothing had been retrieved of either Desmond, their bodies vaporized by the antimatter explosion that had killed them. The weight of the coffin was purely the heavy wood it was built from.

  Kiera was taller than Damien, and with him using magic instead of his hands it took them a moment to adjust the burden for both of them to carry it easily. They still had a ways to go, and this was the hardest part. Even the speech had been easier than metaphorically carrying his King.

  The path to the Black Mausoleum was long and chilly, but someone had come up the previous day to make sure it was clear. Even there, even now, a security team led the way along the path. Stealey’s funeral had been less secured…but the Mage-King of Mars hadn’t just died then.

  Two crypts stood open side by side, with the slabs to close them resting on the ground next to them, as the procession reached the end of their journey.

  “Together?” he said softly to Kiera.