A pair of armored Royal Guards stood outside the door, making sure no one entered who wasn’t supposed to. One of them should have pinged Samara when he arrived, but she was clearly ignoring her messages as she stared at multiple lists on the screens in front of her.
He smiled as he crossed over to join her, noting that a long lock of black hair had escaped from the side of today’s dark green headscarf. His fingers twitched to smooth it back under the garment, and he managed not to kick himself for the urge.
There was no planet and no universe in which that was appropriate.
“What makes no sense?” he asked, pulling a stool over to sit by the screen.
“You really want to know?” Samara replied. “I’m elbow-deep in connection maps, and I’m not liking any of my answers.”
“At least you’re getting answers?” Denis asked. “I’m mostly worried about us drawing giant blanks.”
“Well, do you want to assume that this was Desmond the Fourth committing suicide and taking his father with him?” the Voice asked, gesturing at two of her lists. “Because he’s the only person who has both accessed the Rune Breaker matrix schematics and met with Desmond the Third the night before their last flight.”
The lists, Denis realized, were of names. He’d seen Samara do the same thing when they’d been trying to identify the Keepers, flagging connections between various people.
“While I don’t want to rule anything out completely, that seems a low-order probability,” Denis agreed. “What else have you got?”
“Zero overlap on the direct lists, so I’m on relationship maps,” she told him, gesturing to a section of the screen where each name on a main list was connected to other lists. “Except that the list of people Desmond met with on his last night is short and insanely influential. We’re talking about two Councilors, Chancellor Gregory, General Spader, and a regional infrastructure director.”
“And you’re trying to see if any of them know anyone who accessed the Rune Breaker matrix?” Denis asked.
“Exactly. Except, of course, they all knew Des.” She stared at the map. “I really want to know what the hell the Crown Prince was doing looking at the design for a bullet intended to kill Hands.”
“When did he look at it?” Denis asked. “Would it help your list if you took out everyone who looked at the design after Damien was shot with one?”
“A little,” she told him, clearly having done so already. “Takes three names of seventeen out. Des is not one of them, though he did look at the matrix a second time after the assassination attempt.”
“Checking to see if he remembered it correctly?” Denis guessed. “Strange that he didn’t mention it to anyone.”
“I’d guess that without an intact bullet to compare to, he wasn’t sure he had the right one,” Samara noted. “I wouldn’t have wanted to suggest that the bullet came from a Martian armory.”
“Wait, we’ve built some?” the Guard asked.
“The Guard has exactly one hundred Rune Breaker rounds in inventory,” she told him. “They’re fifty years old and I doubt anyone running the armory even knows what the armory code is for, but the Guard has them. And before you ask, yes, the Guard’s rounds are all still there. The ones Odysseus had were new.”
“Do we know who made them, then? That seems like another point to yank on,” Denis suggested.
“Not yet. MIS is working on it, without knowing about the other half of the investigation.” She shook her head. “Unless I want to accuse one of four of the most powerful people in the star system of regicide, I’m not sure I’ve even got anything to go on from the assassination side.”
“What about the dead drop for Odysseus’s payment?”
The assassin had been paid in transferrable credit chips, physical media payable to the bearer. With limited interstellar communications, some form of hard cash had to exist. Despite the best efforts of banks and the Protectorate, the chips remained difficult to track at the best of times and easily obfuscated by anyone wanting to transfer funds anonymously.
She snorted and tapped a command on her wrist-comp. The lists on the screen slid sideways as she brought up another saved window. This one was more names, each attached to a tiny image from a surveillance camera.
“No cameras on the dead drop itself,” she told him. “Three around it. This is every person with a more than seventy-five percent likelihood of having passed the drop in the seventy-two hours. Well. The first page of those people.”
“How many?” he asked.
“Fourteen hundred and twenty-six,” Samara confirmed. “I checked, too. None of them accessed the Rune Breaker data, though just over two hundred work in the Mountain.”
“What about the dead drop for the bullets?” Denis asked. “If there’s a connection, it may have been the same person making the drop both times.”
“Time frame is too old,” she replied. “Most civilian security systems and companies hold a six-month archive, but we can’t write a warrant to access data that doesn’t exist.”
“Makes sense,” he admitted, studying the lists. “I’m guessing you already ran who among the people who accessed the data works for the people who met with Desmond?”
“At least three worked for Spader in one capacity or another,” she told him. “Two worked for Gregory, including a man who was his personal secretary at the time. One worked for Councilor Granger.”
“Nobody for the other Councilor?” Denis asked.
“Not directly, but there’s three people linked to Councilor Coral if I dig a layer deeper.” She sighed, glancing sideways at him and tugging on the loose lock of hair. “I’ve got lots of data, Denis, but I have no answers for you. Right now, I could connect this in a way that condemns any of those four people—but I can also connect it in a way that supports Desmond Four committing an elaborate, grandiose suicide.”
“What about Nemesis?” he asked softly. “You were on that file. Does anything from that son of a bitch link to this?”
Nemesis had, after all, tried to wipe out the entire Council at one point. The man—organization? Cult? They weren’t quite sure what Nemesis was—was their most likely link between the two attacks.
“I’ve got a bunch of gray-tier possibles on potential members or contacts of Nemesis,” she admitted. “I was hoping that one of them would match up with our Rune Breaker accesses, but nada. No Nemesis possible. No Keepers either, actually. I ran that comparison, too.”
“Not one?” Denis asked. “I was still operating under the assumption the attack was a Keeper operation.”
“I don’t have a complete list of members, but we’re pretty sure we’ve flagged every active member who worked in the Mountain,” she told him. “They’re all dead, of course, but there were a lot of them.
“None of them accessed this file. There might have a been a copy in their archives, in which case all of this is a waste of my damn time.” Samara hissed the last few words.
“Inshallah, I’ll find something sooner or later, but this feels like a brick wall.”
Denis wasn’t a fan of relying on God for an answer, though he knew that wasn’t really what Samara meant.
“Do any of the people on the dead drop list work for anyone who met with the Mage-King?”
“A few,” she told him. “Two hundred work in the Mountain, so technically all of them work for Gregory?”
A few tranches of color swept through the list of names and Samara paused.
“That’s odd,” she murmured. “Nobody working for Granger went near that spot. It’s not that out of the way, or the whole point of using it as a dead drop doesn’t work. It could be fluke…”
“But nobody? How many people in the Mountain work for Granger in one sense or another?” Denis asked, trying not to think too hard about what he was implying.
“Like the rest of the Councilors, he pulls double duty as ambassador to Mars,” she said absently. “One hundred and fourteen people work in his embassy, ten more than work in C
ouncilor Coral’s…and seven of Coral’s people are flagged on here.”
“That’s most likely coincidence, though, right?” Denis asked.
“It’s possibly coincidence,” she agreed. “Or a few senior employees were told to avoid that particular street and it’s percolated through the staff. That makes no sense, though.”
“Unless they knew that a dead drop for the local assassin organization, such as it is, was on that street,” he said grimly. “Do we know what the person on Granger’s staff who pulled the Rune Breaker schematics did with them?”
“Hard to tell. She went home to Tau Ceti over a year ago, so we can’t even ask her questions in a timely fashion,” Samara told him. “I can pull a profile on her relatively quickly, though. I just…can’t see why Granger would be involved in this.”
“Neither can I,” Denis admitted. “And the problem is that I’m not seeing a link to the assassination other than his having dinner with the Mage-King, either. But several bits add up to him being linked to the attack on Montgomery.
“The bullets are the key to that link…and I think that link will give us Nemesis.”
“But we have no reason to believe that Nemesis was involved in the attack on the Mage-King,” she pointed out. “Following up on the attack on Montgomery is worthwhile, but I’m not sure it’s going to help us.”
Denis considered a conversation he’d had with Montgomery and grimaced.
“It might help us more than we think,” he told her. “Montgomery suspects at least some of the Councilors knew there was a plot against the Mage-King. Not, I’m certain, in any detail—but I have to wonder.
“And since the pieces are starting to fall together, I want to see how that puzzle looks. But we must fit it into the one we need to solve.”
38
“Suresh Granger was one of my father’s most trusted allies in the Council, a loyalist in both name and truth,” Kiera Alexander told the small group read in on the secret investigation after Samara dropped her bombshell.
There weren’t many people in the room. Damien himself and Kiera were in chairs leaning against the big desk, facing Samara at the other end of a rough circle containing Romanov, Gregory and Christoffsen.
“I’m not disbelieving you, Voice Samara,” the Mage-Queen continued, “but this seems beyond any logical reasoning.”
“I agree,” Samara said calmly. “And if I could line up the pieces any other way, I would. May I walk everyone through the connections?”
“Give her a chance, Kiera,” Damien told his charge. “One of the reasons Lady Samara has her Warrant is because of her ability to put together the pieces.”
“I’ll warn you in advance, some of the connections are tenuous and circumstantial at most,” the MIS investigator told them as she took control of the screen above her and lowered it over the office’s armored windows.
“One of the key assumptions we’re working from here is that the organization or individual known as Nemesis was involved in both the assassination attempt on Damien Montgomery and the assassination of the Desmonds,” she stated. “Even if that assumption is correct, it seems unlikely that Councilor Granger is a member of that organization. I suspect, unfortunately, that the impetus for the first of the incidents came from Councilor Granger.”
“He attacked Damien?” Kiera demanded.
“I now believe so, yes,” Samara confirmed. “Even if we can’t link this to His Majesty’s assassination, I have sufficient evidence to lay charges of treason, attempted murder and conspiracy to commit the same against the Councilor.”
The room was silent and Damien studied his companions. There was no one in the room he didn’t trust completely, which meant it was a very small crowd. Chancellor Gregory had been silent so far, as had Denis Romanov.
Their presence brought the total number in the room to five. On the other hand, that five included the three most powerful individuals in the Protectorate. His office was more than capable of holding this crowd. He could have doubled the number of people in the meeting, and he still would have chairs and space for them.
“Lay it out, Samara,” Damien told her.
“All right.” An image of the Rune Breaker bullet appeared on the screen. “Our key point of connection is these. Desmond the First designed the Rune Breaker anti-materiel round for the sole use of the Royal Guard, as a countermeasure to his own Hands.
“While capable, as we’ve seen, of being fired from an anti-materiel rifle, the round is actually chambered to be fired from the standard exosuit penetrator rifle of the late twenty-third century Martian Marine Corps.
“Approximately fifty years ago, the design was accessed by a group of Royal Guard technicians during a period of suspicion around several of His Majesty’s Hands. They revised the rounds to a more modern sniper caliber and manufactured one hundred units. Just in case.”
“All of those rounds are still in the armory in the Mountain,” Denis Romanov interjected. “I physically checked them prior to this meeting.”
Damien nodded and concealed a sigh of relief.
“The rounds in Xander Odysseus’s possession were manufactured in August of twenty-four fifty-eight,” Samara said quietly. “They were picked up from the armorer who made them and, given the timing we now know, delivered directly to Odysseus’s dead drop.”
“We have that record?” Damien asked.
“We do,” she confirmed. “MIS investigators executed a warrant at Chen Zhao’s Custom Armaments this morning. So far, that has not leaked to the media, but we have confirmed with Mr. Chen that the rounds were made there. Mr. Chen also confirmed that he had no ability to empower the rounds and does not employ any Mages in his work.”
“Who hired him?” Kiera demanded.
“According to his paperwork, no one,” Samara told him. “The rounds are on the records as a personal project of Mr. Chen’s. Only the legal requirements for complete records in a facility of that type allowed us to confirm they had been produced at all.
“Upon further interrogation, we discovered that Mr. Chen had just started his shop at the time and was personal friends with David Granger, the Councilor’s son. The rounds were directly manufactured by the junior Granger and presumably empowered by him.
“The rounds remained in the shop for twenty-four hours before they were picked up by this gentleman.”
An image of an older man in a conservative blue suit appeared on the screen. He looked vaguely familiar to Damien.
“This is Rahul Fay, a junior attaché with the Tau Ceti embassy. He picked up a sealed package from Mr. Chen’s shop. We know that package was picked up from the dead drop by Mr. Odysseus six hours later, so we can only assume that Mr. Fay made the delivery.”
“Is Fay still on Mars?” Gregory asked, the Chancellor’s voice chilly.
“Both Fay and the younger Granger have returned to Tau Ceti,” Christoffsen replied, the Professor presumably having handled that part of the investigation. “The younger Granger did so very recently, in the wake of Desmond the Fourth’s death. The two were ex-lovers and still close friends. Or so I presume from David Granger being one of Des’s pallbearers, anyway.”
“David didn’t take Des’s death well,” Kiera told them. “I can’t see him or his father being involved in Des’s assassination.”
“I’ll get to that connection in a moment,” Samara promised. “Right now, the key remaining point is that the Rune Breaker designs were accessed by Councilor Granger’s personal aide six weeks before the rounds were made. He had clearance due to a research project he was engaging in on the early history of our colonization.
“Mr. Blanchett, unfortunately, is dead,” the Voice concluded. “Natural causes a year ago. Even with all of this, it’s only mildly suspicious.”
“So, we’re looking at a chain of patsies at one or two steps removed from the Councilor,” Gregory said grimly. “It’s circumstantial in many ways but enough for a warrant to go through the Councilor’s files.”
&nbs
p; “Attempted murder of a Hand isn’t usually a capital crime,” Samara replied. “But even the accusation would end Granger’s career on Mars—and ruin any chance of his son becoming the next Prince Consort.”
“The chance was already pretty damn low,” Kiera noted. “David took a year to worm his way back into Des’s good graces after their breakup. And, well, unlike my late brother, David is completely gay.”
Making it less likely that Suresh would try to make him Kiera’s Prince Consort.
“Agreed, but it was definitely a factor in Granger’s thinking,” the Voice told them. “I believe that the assassination attempt may have even been an attempt to protect the Mage-King from Damien’s difficulties. Desmond would sacrifice much to protect a living Hand, but even he would smear the name of a dead man to serve the Protectorate.”
Damien winced. He could see that chain of events all too clearly. In some ways, that assassin could have prevented the entire Secession War. Of course, Damien’s death at that juncture would also have doomed the entire Council. Including Suresh Granger.
“Our evidence linking Suresh Granger to Desmond’s death is slimmer,” Samara noted. “But several decisions he pushed during the negotiations around the new Constitution seem to have been shaped by an expectation that Desmond would not live to see the document signed.
“Combined with the potential for someone to have blackmailed him with evidence of the assassination plot…”
“Desmond was angry,” Damien murmured. “I’m not sure the fact that an attack on a Hand isn’t technically a capital crime would have saved Granger if that had come out.”
“He was one of the two people to join His Majesty and the Crown Prince for dinner that night. Security records Romanov accessed show he stayed to speak with them both after Councilor Coral had left,” Christoffsen told them. “Monsieur Granger had potentially the only opportunity to convince His Majesty that Des needed to be present when we unveiled the Link.”
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