Mountain of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “Together,” she agreed.

  They carefully slid the empty coffin into the crypt, the stone surface angled ever so slightly to allow the weight to help them.

  Des would come second, but there were two more steps. Damien exchanged a nod with Kiera, and both of them touched the basalt at the base of the crypt and reached for their magic. She started at the beginning, he started at the end, and the black basalt turned white under their power.

  They met in the middle of the text. There were no dates: many of the first people buried there hadn’t known when they were born, and tradition dictated silence now. That left only two lines of text on the black basalt, for all the world to see:

  Desmond Michael Alexander

  Third Mage-King of Mars

  The wake that followed was at least partially a formal affair, but there were no more speeches for Damien or Kiera to make. Once they escaped the seemingly endless receiving line of people giving their condolences, it was merely a party in memory of the Mage-Queen’s father and brother.

  “I feel like I could probably intimidate the bartender into giving me something harder,” Kiera murmured as she and Damien propped up the same wall. She was holding a glass of iced tea instead of the wine he was slowly drinking.

  “Probably,” he agreed. “It would be a terrible idea and might cost the poor woman her career, since she’s not supposed to serve alcohol to any of the minors here.”

  “You’d save her. If I told you to,” she replied.

  “Probably,” he repeated. “It’s still a terrible idea.”

  “Fine.” She took a sip of the tea and looked around. “May I ask you something, Damien?”

  “I may not answer, but you can ask me anything,” he told her. “There are topics you’re better off finding a woman for, I’ll admit.”

  That earned him a moment of glare.

  “Not that kind of something.” She glanced around the room again. “How many people here actually care? I lost my father, but they just lost…a symbol. And even at that, the symbol is replaced and the Protectorate endures.

  “What do any of them care?”

  “There’s almost certainly people here who don’t,” Damien agreed thoughtfully as he glanced around the room. Most of the Council was present, as were at least half the senior military officers in the systems.

  “Most of the people at this party? They knew your father,” he reminded her. “Not well, most of them. I doubt any of us knew him well except maybe you and Des, but they knew him. They mourn him.

  “To answer your question, most of the people here care, to one degree or another. That the Protectorate endures past the death of the Mage-King is by design; it’s not a flaw.”

  “I know. But it feels like we just…accept his death and move on. I…I don’t want to move on, Damien. He was my father. I don’t want to forget him. I don’t want to forget Des!”

  “Don’t,” Damien told her. “That’s…up to you, really. I haven’t forgotten my parents or my siblings, and it’s been fifteen years. I haven’t forgotten Alaura Stealey, Narveer Singh, Charlotte Ndosi…my list goes on for a while, Kiera.

  “Friends, family, lovers…for my sins, I am the Protectorate’s head of state until you turn nineteen. You will be our head of state for the rest of your life, and you will send people you care about to their deaths.

  “Forget none of them,” he told her fiercely. “We have to move on from those deaths; we have to live to make their sacrifices worth something. But we don’t forget them, Kiera. I’ll carry your father and what he taught me in my heart and my head for the rest of my life.”

  He smiled sadly.

  “I think that might be the closest thing I know of to immortality.”

  Kiera was crying again and he fished a tissue out of the inside of his jacket.

  “We’ll remember them, Kiera,” he said, blinking back hot tears of his own for a moment before giving up and grabbing more tissues to share. “We go forward, yes, but we never forget the ones we leave behind. No one’s asking you to.”

  “Feels like it, some days,” she confessed through her tears. “Like I’m only supposed to think about the next steps, what we do to replace them and move on.”

  “We have to think about those things,” Damien agreed. “And it’s hard and it should be hard. But we take it on together. I’ve got your back, Kiera.”

  “I know.”

  They were both silent then, finishing their glasses. Damien was surveying the crowd as he did and spotted people moving toward them.

  That wasn’t a surprise. It was a surprise they’d had the few minutes of privacy they’d had.

  “Eyes up, Kiera,” he instructed. “You don’t have to smile and play pretty princess tonight, but we do need to talk to people.”

  “I know.” She inhaled, sniffled, and nodded firmly. “I’ll be all right, Damien. I think I can handle this. Split up, divide and conquer?”

  The movement was Suresh Granger and his son, the young man who’d carried Des’s coffin.

  Also an ex-boyfriend of Des and someone Kiera didn’t get along with as a rule. She was dodging that friction…which was fine by Damien.

  “Sounds like a plan,” he told her. “I’ll take Granger and his kid; you go glad-hand the rest of the Council.”

  Several other Councilors converged on Damien and the Grangers for a conversation that managed to almost entirely stay away from business and focus on personal recollections of Desmond Michael Alexander.

  “I remember the first time I was on Mars,” Suresh Granger told them all. “My father was visiting as the Governor’s representative for a specific matter—I was too young to remember what it was now. He’d already been King for twenty years, but he took the time to have dinner with all of us, including the kids.”

  The old Tau Ceti Councilor shook his head. “They even served my favorite dessert, and while I was trying not to actively dive across the table to it—I was eleven,” he noted with a smile. “I caught him looking at me and grinning.

  “He’d known and he’d made sure they served it, just to make the kid of a diplomat he’d probably never work with again happy,” Granger concluded. “I still look back to that day as the moment I knew I was Desmond Alexander’s man.”

  There were nods and chuckles around the group, and Damien looked around again, recognizing faces a bit more carefully. The Councilors surrounding him had all been in the group Desmond had called his Loyalists, the ones who’d supported his agenda in the Council.

  He also realized, somewhat unexpectedly, that the group had gained a new member whose arrival he’d missed. Munira Samara winked at him when she saw he’d recognized her, then bowed.

  “My Lord Regent, I can’t help but note that your wine glass is empty,” she told him. “May I refill it for you?”

  Damien raised a questioning eyebrow, not least because he could tell Samara’s own glass was full of iced tea. The Muslim detective didn’t drink alcohol.

  “I believe I can fill my own glass,” he said slowly. “Would you care to accompany me, Lady Samara?”

  Her new Warrant might not have been officially announced, but just having held the title of Voice in the past meant she was due that honorific.

  “I think I spotted a dessert tray that requires further investigation,” she agreed. “Lead on, my lord.”

  “Councilors,” Damien said to his companions, nodding to them. “I look forward to speaking with you again, though we all know the next time will be less convivial.”

  Desmond’s Loyalists in the old structure, after all, weren’t entirely on the Mountain’s side when it came to building a new structure.

  “Don’t worry; we’ll go easy on you for at least one more meeting,” Granger told him with a chuckle before bowing his farewell.

  With a final nod to the rest of the crowd, Damien followed Samara off toward the banquet table.

  “What do you need?” he murmured to her.

  “Private appointment, off the b
ooks,” she said calmly, her voice equally soft as they relied on the noise of the crowd to cover their conversation. “I didn’t want a digital record of the request, either.”

  “I hate not trusting our systems,” Damien replied. “I’m booked tomorrow, but I can drop out of this after another hour and meet with you then.”

  “That’ll work,” she confirmed. “I need to brief you.”

  That was…promising.

  “You found something?” he asked.

  “We think we’ve IDed the assassin, but it’s not a hundred percent and the next move is pushing a Voice’s authority far enough that I want backup.”

  “This is black-on-black, Munira,” Damien reminded her. “I’ll back you, within reason at least.”

  “We need a Hand,” the Voice admitted as they reached the wine bar. “Since I haven’t heard about any of those arriving in-system, I’m open to suggestions.”

  A Hand. The only thing a Voice would want a Hand for was an open assault on a fortified position.

  Just what had Samara found?

  “Give me an hour, then meet me in the Mage-King’s office,” Damien instructed. “There are always options.”

  And if they’d found Desmond the Third’s assassin, the breadth of those options was astonishing.

  29

  “It wasn’t as easy as it should have been,” Samara said grimly as she brought up a series of image feeds on the holoprojectors. “Even once we found unaltered footage, our target was only in the cameras for seventeen minutes.”

  “I didn’t think we’d even get proof of alteration,” Damien pointed out. “Where did you find unedited footage?”

  “At some point, the Royal Guard installed a secondary feed on every security system in the Mountain, feeding to a one-write-only archive hidden near the geothermal plants. Spader gave us access,” Romanov told him, the Royal Guard pacing the room behind Samara. “We confirmed our worst fears: not only were Hand codes used to allow access to rewrite the data, the software used to do so defeated our best detection tools.”

  “We should be able to identify something now that we have access to an unedited copy of the data, right?” Damien asked.

  “We’d need to read in a more advanced programmer than me for that,” Samara told him. “Once this is over, that will be necessary, but right now, I think secrecy trumps it.

  “In any case, our target is good,” she noted, drawing their attention back to the footage they had retrieved. “Good enough, in fact, that I think the couple of unforced errors I’m seeing are because they knew the footage was going to be wiped.

  “They’re using a digital-interface face-wrap and keeping their face away from cameras. All of that would draw attention, but as you can see in the footage, they avoid all contact with people on their way in and out.”

  “What are they carrying?” Damien asked, studying the imagery.

  “It’s a toolbox,” Samara replied. “Interestingly, it’s a toolbox they picked up inside the Mountain. Watching this, I don’t think there was a bomb. I think they used our tools plus some additional modules to rig up a device to sever the antimatter piping.”

  “Is that possible?” he asked.

  “We’d have to ask Chief Wattana,” Romanov told him. “I think so. The tools to work with those conduits are capable of severing them, after all. They just have multi-layer safeties to make sure they don’t sever an active conduit.”

  “I doubt the cutter they rigged would be usable afterwards, but it didn’t need to be,” Samara told Damien. “Assembled from what was on hand. We’re looking at someone at the top of their trade, a professional determined to make it look like an accident.”

  “And from what you’re saying, we don’t have an ID?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Samara told him. “I said it should have been easier, but the target is very good. We have only two blips of footage that got us more than just eyes. Unfortunately for our target, my software is better at accounting for that interference face-wrap than he thinks.”

  “Was it enough?” Damien asked.

  She gestured. The imagery from the Mountain’s security systems vanished, replaced by six faces.

  “It was enough to narrow it down to these six people in the Martian civil databases,” she concluded. “These two are actually sufficiently well known that I cross-verified against publicly available media records of them.”

  Two of the faces flashed blue. One went dull.

  “Kristoff Tolwyn is a news anchor in Curiosity City,” she noted. “It took me under five minutes to confirm exactly where he’d been during the time the assassin was in the Mountain: at work, prepping to go on air.”

  One of the faces remained lit up in blue.

  “The other four I couldn’t cross-verify, and as non-public figures, I have limited access to their schedules and movements,” she continued. “These two I was able to sufficiently confirm locations to rule them out.”

  Three faces remained, one of them the one she’d lit up in blue.

  “I can’t confirm the location of Johnathon Brown or Caleb Wurst during the infiltration,” Samara noted. “Wurst lives on the other side of the planet, so it seems likely he was at work at the time. I’m working to confirm that, but keeping this investigation under wraps slows the process.

  “Brown, on the other hand, is a citizen of Olympus Mons and does not, upon investigation, appear to have been seen since Desmond’s death,” she concluded. “Our other remaining suspect is this man.”

  She gestured to the still-blue-highlighted face.

  “Alexander Ryan Odysseus, stage name Xander O,” she identified him. “He’s a minor sports celebrity, working in several varieties of what I’d call extreme performance art more than true sports.

  “He lives in an isolated estate paid for by a family trust fund less than one hour’s flight from the Mountain.” She paused. “He has multiple scheduled appearances over the next few weeks and is definitely still on Mars—he’s been seen since the Mage-King’s death.

  “He also appears to have flown to Olympus Mons in his private shuttle for dinner and a stay at the Hotel Rhino the night of our infiltration. He was back home before the launch, but he was definitely in the City during our target time period.”

  “A sports celebrity acting as a hitman,” Damien noted. “That seems…unlikely.”

  “Johnathon Brown is a hairdresser,” Samara said dryly. “That seems about as likely, but they’re my top two suspects.”

  “You can write warrants to investigate their homes and interrogate them yourself, Voice Samara,” Damien pointed out. “What do you need my backup for?”

  “Because the first thing I did after we IDed Odysseus as a potential suspect was call in a favor from the boys on high,” Romanov said quietly. “And we found…this.”

  Damien had spent enough time aboard warships and working with Marines that he could read military iconography as easily as he could read Martian Runic or English.

  The hologram now projecting in the middle of his office answered his question. It was the valley estate they’d been talking about, and it looked like a pleasant place to live. On the surface.

  The icons glowing red across the display gave the lie to that surface. Several sheds, positioned to look like they held grounds maintenance equipment, concealed antiaircraft missile launchers. Several areas that appeared to be covered in grass sod had more red icons, marking concealed defensive weapons.

  “Control center?” he asked calmly as he surveyed a surprisingly heavily fortified estate.

  “Unclear,” Romanov responded. “That alone suggests it’s under the house.”

  “All automated or remote-controlled,” Damien noted, continuing to review the data. “No personnel on the site?”

  “A few life signs, nothing to suggest the kind of support I’d expect these to have.”

  “Would you two care to explain what you’re going on about?” Samara asked. “I understand that the estate is more defended t
han Romanov wants to take on with just half a dozen Royal Guard, but that’s about it.”

  “The estate is a fortified compound with heavily automated weapons systems covering the ground and air approaches,” Damien told her. “The Royal Guard could take it, but they’d be vulnerable on approach to these antiaircraft launchers. Which, I’ll note, are illegal as all hell on Mars.”

  “Why didn’t the Navy know this was here already, then?” the detective asked.

  “We don’t make a policy of doing deep thermal and visual scans of civilian property,” Romanov replied. “A cruiser’s captain could read over the shoulder of any given individual on a bit under forty percent of Mars. We have privacy laws for a reason, Voice Samara.”

  “We wouldn’t normally respond to the presence of illegal weapons with an assault drop, either,” Damien added. “Their presence is grounds for a warrant to seize the weapons and search the property, but in the absence of an active crime, we’d deal with this slowly and peaceably.”

  “That’s our practice for a stockpile of assault rifles in an old fortified dome,” Samara countered. “I’m not sure we’d do the same thing for antiaircraft missiles and, what, automated gun turrets?”

  “All we really can say is remote-controlled pop-up turrets of some kind,” Romanov said. “They could be paintball guns. In theory.”

  “The AA launchers and their sensors suggest differently,” Damien concluded. “The threat level is enough higher than that stockpile of assault rifles that we probably would take it slowly, Voice Samara.

  “But when one of our two top suspects for the assassination of the Mage-King of Mars is in an illegally fortified compound equipped with antiaircraft weaponry, I consider that a full set of strikes.” He studied the map grimly.

  “Denis is correct,” he continued with a gesture at the Guard-Lieutenant. “The team of Guards he can pull together isn’t able to assault this facility. Mostly, it’s a problem of transportation: the Royal Guard has a limited air-transport pool. One of the Royal shuttles would be the best choice, but there’s enough launchers in there to threaten even an assault shuttle, unless that shuttle makes a proper assault approach that will trigger every sensor on half the planet.”