Kiera considered his words for a few seconds, then shrugged.
“Fuck. Them,” she said precisely. “I don’t think anyone in that room killed my father, Damien. But some of them…I think some of them might have known it was coming.”
“That’s a hell of an accusation, Kiera,” he reminded her, glancing around. They were flanked by Royal Guards and he was reasonably comfortable in their privacy, but this still wasn’t really a conversation to have on Council Station.
“I was watching their faces while you were steamrolling them, Damien,” she told him. “I suspect we want to talk to Councilor Neil in private at some point. I got the feeling he went along with the majority and might be willing to be more frank than some of the others.”
“Maybe, but we need to be careful of what we even imply here,” he warned her. “Remember that your father died in an accident.”
Kiera’s gaze snapped back to his, her eyes flashing before she remembered where they were and got his point.
“Right,” she said quietly. “But…it feels like they would never have committed to some of the things in the document we’re now holding them to if they thought it was actually going to be in the final draft.
“The Councilor job has been a sinecure, a reward for loyal service, for the Governors for years. Giving up both that and leaving the power of the purse in a shorter-term, inherently less-controllable Parliament?”
She shook her head.
“I think they agreed to that because at least some of them knew there were currents running against Dad.”
Damien shivered. This conversation was the closest Kiera was going to come, in this environment, to saying that she figured at least some of the Councilors had known there was a plot afoot. They might not have been involved, but they’d known the life expectancy of the Mage-King of Mars was shrinking.
“Those are troubled waters you’re fishing in, my Queen,” he told her. “We should continue this conversation aboard Lioness of Justice.”
“But I’m not wrong, am I?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he countered. “What I do know is that walls often have ears and these walls belong to the Council.”
Kiera was extraordinarily intelligent—the longer he spent as her foster parent, the more Damien became convinced of that—but she hadn’t been working in active politics before. His more subtle hints had been missed, but she got his message now.
“Of course, my Lord Regent,” she told him. “But we will have that conversation.”
“We will,” he confirmed. He was grimly certain she was right—which meant that was something else to hand over to Samara and Christoffsen. Another loose string to yank on.
36
“Well, I now know more about the process of hiring a professional killer on Mars than I did before,” Munira Samara told the small gathering in the private dining room of the Martian Royal Family.
Christoffsen and Gregory joined the previous team now. It was still a small crowd, with Romanov joining Damien and Kiera and the rest at the table while hand-selected Royal Guard stood at the doors.
Even with the armored Guards, there were only nine people in the room.
“I would have expected you to know more about that topic than most,” Kiera suggested. “That was your job, wasn’t it?”
“I was MIS Homicide, yes,” Samara told the Queen. “And while this end of it would have mostly been on MIS Organized Crime, I knew most of what MIS knew about it. And I now know things we didn’t know before.
“So, one of my questions, my lords, my Queen, is when I can share that data with MIS.”
“When the investigation goes public,” Damien decided instantly. “We don’t want to hold on to it when it might save lives, but right now, this chain of investigation is our most critical line. Until we have nailed everyone involved in Desmond’s death to a wall, we keep it all under our hats.”
“Understood,” she told him. “The sad truth is that the whole structure is set up to protect both sides from exactly what we’re doing. If we caught the contractor, as we did, they couldn’t give up the employer—but the employer wouldn’t be able to give up Mr. Odysseus, either.
“Odysseus has been very cooperative and I’ve got some teams digging into the physical and digital dead drops without knowing what they’re actually looking for,” she continued. “One thing I think we have confirmed is that he was hired for this mission by different people than the ones who hired him to attack Damien.”
“Damn,” Damien said quietly. “I was hoping the bullets would help link everything together.”
“The Rune Breakers,” Christoffsen said, the capitals audible. “I have good news and bad news there.”
“They have a name?” Kiera asked. “That sounds ostentatious.”
“Blame your great-grandfather,” the Professor told her. “He designed the matrix. Designed to go on a heavy round from an anti-materiel rifle, much like the one Odysseus used.”
“The Keepers had it?” Damien asked.
“Probably, but it wasn’t removed from the rest of our archives,” Christoffsen replied. “Once I was able to study an intact round, I was able to find the key identifiers and track it down. The design for the Rune Breaker is in the Mountain’s archives…and, unless I’m severely mistaken, has never officially been stored anywhere else.”
“I imagine Desmond the First thought it was wise to have a weapon he could use against his own Hands,” Damien suggested, a sick feeling resting in the pit of his stomach. “That was his…style.”
“By which my Lord Regent means my great-grandfather was a paranoid, broken man who only managed to do well by humanity out of pure fluke,” Kiera said bluntly.
“I think he did well by us because, despite everything that made him a paranoid, broken man, he was also a fundamentally good person,” Damien countered. “But, yes, him making sure that he could take out Hands with regular snipers is very in character.
“I’m guessing the bad news is that makes it hard to really source the bullets?” he asked.
“Exactly,” Christoffsen confirmed. “Seventeen people have accessed that Matrix design in the last twenty years. I’m going to try and trace the manufacturer now. That, combined with the fact that we know exactly where that dead drop is, gives us a starting point.”
“Unfortunately, that starting point is on the assassination attempt on me, not the actual assassination we’re worried about,” Damien noted. “So long as they weren’t the same person, that doesn’t really help us.”
“We need to track Nemesis in any case, and everything points to Nemesis being involved in both attacks,” Samara countered. “Just because different identifiers were used by the people contacting Odysseus doesn’t mean the chain doesn’t lead back to the same monster at the heart.”
“Fair. Do we have anything to go on?” Damien asked.
Gregory sighed, the Chancellor leaning forward.
“I’ve seen your evidence,” he told them. “But if we can’t find the people behind Odysseus, do we have any options? Do we want to tell the Protectorate that the Mage-King was assassinated and we don’t know who gave the order?”
“Or do we publicly proclaim it was the Republic?” Romanov suggested softly. “I don’t like the idea of lying, but we need to blame somebody and a random hired assassin isn’t going to put people at ease.”
“Not least because we’ve already promised him his life,” Damien noted. “He’s given us a lot, even if none of it’s been entirely useful yet.”
“Once I can turn these interviews over to MIS, we’re going to lay at least eleven murder cases to rest,” Samara pointed out. “Even if we can’t execute him for those, it will give the families some peace.”
“That’s not nothing,” Damien agreed. He glanced at Kiera. “But I want to give the family in this room peace, people. And I want to give the Protectorate peace.”
“I think there’s one question no one has asked that might be more important than w
e think,” Denis Romanov said into the silence that followed. “I’m new to the Royal Guard and protecting a Royal, so I’ve been going through Guard protocol in detail.
“I’d been wondering about it since the shuttle went down, too, but I wasn’t sure if Guard protocol was the same as others in this.” He shook his head. “It is,” he confirmed. “The Mage-King and his heir shouldn’t have been on the same shuttle. Even here, even inside the defensive perimeter of Mars Orbital Command, Des should have been riding in a different spacecraft.
“The only time we put Kiera and Damien on the same shuttle was for a five-minute transfer between ships without ever entering an atmosphere. Des and his father shouldn’t have been on the same ship.
“What happened?”
The room was silent again and Damien turned his gaze to Gregory.
“Malcolm?” he asked softly. “You’re the only one here who might have been involved in that.”
“Des wasn’t supposed to be on that trip at all,” the Chancellor said after a few moments’ thought. “The change in plans came late—very late. We could have got another shuttle online in the time we had, but it would have been a giant pain.
“I remember reviewing the documents in the morning while they were flying up and being surprised. Desmond had authorized the single shuttle flight himself. It made sense—like Guard-Lieutenant Romanov noted, we’re inside the perimeter of MOC. There was no point in their flight where they weren’t a hundred percent secure from external attack.”
Even having been attacked during a similar flight, Damien wasn’t sure he disagreed. Even with the massive scale of the Republican assassination attempt on him, it had failed miserably. The security around the rulers of Mars was tight.
It just hadn’t been tight enough.
“Unless we want to assume this was a complicated suicide plan, that means they changed their mind at the last minute,” Damien concluded. “When was Des added to the plan?”
“About ten PM the prior night, six hours before they flew out,” Gregory said instantly.
“Who met with the Mage-King that night?” Samara asked.
“He didn’t have any formal meetings, I don’t think,” the Chancellor replied. “I’d have to check his schedule records for informal meetings.”
“Someone in this room needs to get on that,” Damien ordered. “I want to know everyone His Majesty met with that evening. Someone talked him into taking Des with him…and I don’t buy that whoever did that didn’t know exactly what was going to happen.
37
“Guard-Lieutenant. Take a seat.”
Denis Romanov obeyed the order gingerly, glancing around General Spader’s utilitarian office as he perched on the edge of the chair in front of her desk.
Unlike Montgomery’s office, there was no solid wood furniture here. The office of the Commandant of the Royal Guard, the woman in charge of the entire defenses of Olympus Mons, was furnished entirely with the standard prefabs of the Martian military.
The room’s walls had been carefully paneled in either wood or a solid facsimile thereof, but most of that treatment was hidden by the prefabricated metal bookshelves except for one section set aside for the Commandant’s “I love me” wall, though Spader’s version of that was relatively understated with only copies of her original Royal Martian Marine Corps commission and her Royal Guard commission.
“You requested my presence, sir,” Denis finally said after ten seconds or so of silence.
“I did,” she confirmed. “I was under the impression, Guard-Lieutenant, that you were assigned to command Lord Regent Montgomery’s protective detail. Am I mistaken somehow?”
“That is correct, General,” he replied.
“I have reports from multiple people—who should probably know better—that suggest that you didn’t even accompany Lord Montgomery off-planet on his mission to Council Station,” she told him. “Others seem to think that you’re almost never in His Excellency’s company.
“What this suggests to me, more than anything, is a certain degree of jealousy at the fact that we brought someone in from outside to command Montgomery’s detail,” she admitted, “but I also cannot leave these comments unaddressed. I don’t believe the Marine Corps is different on this point, but the Royal Guard especially believe that the detail commander should be part of the close-protection team a significant portion of the time they’re on duty.”
“That is the standard in the RMMC as well,” Denis confirmed. “And my own operational preference.”
“So, these are simply the murmurings of jealous officers who feel that they should command the Lord Regent’s bodyguard?” she asked.
“No, sir,” he told her calmly. There were limits to what he could tell Spader without orders to read her into Samara’s investigation, but he also wasn’t going to lie to her. “I have delegated operational command of Lord Montgomery’s detail to Guard-Sergeant Afolabi as His Excellency has assigned me to another duty.”
There was a long pause, followed by a sigh that was almost as long.
“Much as I presumed,” she told him. “I prefer to be kept informed of assignments of my Guard personnel, Guard-Lieutenant Romanov. Did you not think this was relevant to inform me, your superior officer, of?”
“My orders came from the Lord Regent directly,” Denis replied. “The situation he has engaged me in is being handled entirely from his office and under his seal. I am not authorized to discuss the matter with you.”
“I rose to the rank of Colonel in the Royal Martian Marine Corps before taking a transfer to Guard-Lieutenant and rising once again to Guard-General and Commandant of the Royal Guard and the Olympus Mons Defense Command,” Spader said harshly, a mostly unnecessary litany of her ranks.
“I am familiar with the concept of need to know and of confidentiality,” she told him. “I am aware that you are assisting Voice Samara with the task she has been set by His Excellency. Believe me, Guard-Lieutenant, when I tell you that you have done almost everything correctly.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
The response was automatic. Denis knew there was another boot coming.
“What you did not do correctly was that you failed to bring the change in tasking to my attention so I could arrange reinforcement of your detail,” Spader told him. “If Lord Montgomery intends to use his bodyguard as his personal trouble-shooters, that will require me to make sure he has more actual bloody bodyguards.
“So, the moment you were spending more of your time working for Montgomery instead of protecting Montgomery, you should have told me that,” she said. “I don’t need to know what the Lord Regent has you working on—usual protocol would have a Voice escorted and supported by a Secret Service detail, but my job is not to argue with the Lord Regent of Mars—but I need to allocate my Guards appropriately.
“Am I understood, Guard-Lieutenant?”
“Yes, General,” he admitted. “I’m basically full-time supporting Voice Samara at the moment, and Lord Montgomery has requested that we have a four-Guard strike team ready to deploy at his or Voice Samara’s command. That is consuming roughly half of my assigned Guards to keep ready.”
“Is this at all unusual for the Lord Regent?” Spader asked.
“No,” Denis replied bluntly. “His Marine details, his Secret Service details and now his Royal Guard details…he has always treated us more as a personal strike force than a protective detail. Even his injuries did not change this, so I doubt his recent elevation will.”
“So, you need more Guards,” the General concluded. “I perhaps grew too used to an old man who never left the Mountain and used Hands for those kinds of tasks.”
“I don’t believe Montgomery feels that the creation of new Hands is truly within his authority,” Denis admitted. “That will change over time, I hope, but he is very much in the mindset of caretaker.”
“Which is a good thing, if occasionally a pain in the ass,” Spader replied. She shook her head with a sigh. “Pay at
tention, Guard-Lieutenant.”
Wordlessly, she rolled up the left sleeve of her burgundy suit, revealing an extremely familiar pattern of silver whorls and knots wrapped around her left forearm.
“It is not only the Hands who the Mage-Kings have marked with Runes of Power,” she murmured as she rolled the sleeve back down. “That I carry one is a closely held secret…so closely held that I think the only people who knew died on His Majesty’s shuttle.
“Now you know. Both Her Majesty and His Excellency should know, but you are sufficiently in Montgomery’s confidence to provide that information when he needs it.”
She studied him.
“I will put an end to the whispers,” she told him firmly. “We will be assigning more Guards to your detail. Is Afolabi up for the task?”
“He may need more rank,” Denis admitted slowly. “He is technically an NCO, after all. Handing him ten Guards didn’t cause any problems. Putting twenty or thirty under his command, well…”
“That is my concern, not yours,” Spader replied. “Whatever is necessary will be done. Anyone who wishes to cause problems will be silenced.
“Understand, Denis Romanov, that the Royal Guard are a family. Like most families, we are occasionally argumentative and have our moments of internal jealousy, but every Mage under my command has proven their loyalty and fealty to the Mountain beyond question.
“I do not need to know what the Lord Regent has assigned you to assure you that you have the support of the entire Royal Guard. There are few more powerful forces on Mars…and all of those answer to Lord Regent Montgomery.”
“We hope,” Denis murmured. Someone had nearly managed to assassinate the Mage-King of Mars without being caught. And unless something broke unexpectedly, he was starting to suspect that the people behind Xander Odysseus might still go uncaught.
“That makes no sense.”
Denis was reasonably sure that Munira Samara wasn’t paying any attention to him. He was reasonably sure the investigator hadn’t even noticed him entering the lab-slash-office she’d taken over, in fact.
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