Mountain of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “If everything goes according to plan, Mage-Captain, you’ll keep that appointment,” Damien told her. “But first, I need to read you in on potentially the most classified situation currently going on in the Protectorate.”

  “Of course, my lord. We have a secure conference room just this way,” she told him.

  He shook his head. There could be no leaks of this. Damien was certain that he’d only managed to pin down Granger because the Councilor hadn’t known what was coming. Given the penetration shown by Nemesis and their organization so far, the only way he was going to catch Winton was by taking him completely by surprise.

  “That’s enough for our conversation, but the security of this matter requires a step beyond,” he told her. “I need you to initiate covert lockdown protocols. Before we discuss this.”

  Denuiad blinked but slowly nodded.

  “I understand,” she confirmed. “Major Tupi can show you to the conference room while I speak to my XO, my lord. There will be no leaks from Duke. I will make certain of it.”

  Covert lockdown meant that the ship went onto full communications lockdown, but a series of protocols were put in place to maintain at least the appearance of communications from the outside. The deception wouldn’t succeed forever, but it would buy them three or four hours before serious questions started getting asked.

  Damien was going to need every one of those hours.

  “The ship is now under covert lockdown protocols,” Denuiad told Damien and Romanov as she entered the office. “All external communications are locked to my personal wrist-comp, and the ship’s computers have initiated an ASI protocol to respond to incoming coms.”

  “Good,” Damien said. “And this room is secure as well?” He gestured around the utilitarian secured conference room.

  Denuiad tapped a command.

  “We are now cut off from the universe, my lord,” she said quietly. “I question the wisdom of cutting the Lord Regent off this completely, but the decision is yours.”

  “Communications blackouts are necessary for security, Mage-Captain,” Damien told her. “I don’t spend my entire life available to all questions, I assure you.”

  “Of course, my lord. What’s going on?”

  “The first thing you need to understand is very simple,” he said quietly. “Our King was murdered.”

  He gave the two officers a moment to recover from that. He wasn’t even sure what language Tupi’s cursing was in, but he was quite certain what the man was saying no matter what tongue the words were from.

  “We have confirmed this and have the assassin in custody,” he continued. “We have made deals for information with several individuals involved, since I want to nail the people responsible for Desmond’s death to a wall, not merely the hands that carried it out.”

  “What do you need of us?” Denuiad asked, her voice shaky for the first time since Damien had boarded her ship. “I don’t… How?”

  “Complicated,” Damien said drily. “There were a lot of moving pieces and most of them were very subtle, but I am certain. What I need from your ship, Mage-Captain, is transportation and support on the next step.

  “We have traced the orders to this relay station in the asteroid belt.” As he spoke, Romanov was tapping commands on the armor of his arm. No one other than the Guard could see the keyboard, but the computers received the orders anyway.

  The image and coordinates of the old UN relay appeared in the middle of the conference room.

  “The station was built by the UN during the Eugenicist War and, despite several attempts since, has proven economically nonviable since,” Damien told his people. “What information we have is in the files Denis is providing you.

  “We believe the facility was occupied and expanded by the Belt Liberation Front, including the installation of crude stealth baffling to fool Protectorate scanners,” he continued. “After the fall of the Belt Liberation Front, our information suggests it was reoccupied by forces of the organization we now know as Nemesis.”

  “That’s one hell of a name, sir,” Tupi told him.

  “Egotistical and ostentatious, yes,” Damien agreed. “In every way counter to most operations of theirs that we’ve encountered. We have directly linked them to the extermination campaign waged against the Keepers and the weapons provided to the BLF for their attack on Council Station.”

  He shrugged.

  “Beyond that, we know very little about these people. That’s what this is about.” He gestured an armored hand at the holographic image of the relay station.

  “If this station is actually under control of Nemesis, it will entail only our third confirmed direct contact with the organization,” Damien told Duke’s officers. Their only confirmed encounters had been two very uncomfortable meetings with Winton.

  “We need the station’s data storage intact and we need prisoners,” he continued. “That gives us two critical targets inside the station: the main data center and the reactor core. We cannot lose the information in their computers and we can’t let them self-destruct the station.”

  “What kind of defenses are we looking at?” Denuiad asked. “Everything I’m seeing says the place is dead and abandoned.”

  “We’re reasonably certain that is their main defense,” Romanov replied. “To make a station like that look dead is possible but not easy. From close range, you should be able to identify both the data center and the reactor.”

  “Agreed, but if it’s that stealthed, they’ll see us coming long before I can get Marines to the data center,” Tupi told them. “We couldn’t resolve data-server heat signatures at more than a light-second normally, let alone with the kind of baffles this place must have.”

  “It’s possible we’re looking at an entirely automated relay and all we need to do is fly up to it and take what we need,” Damien said. “Most likely, though, you are correct. Any conventional assault on this relay station will result in the destruction of the data long before we can retrieve it.”

  He smiled thinly.

  “I have no intention of launching a conventional assault. Tell me, Mage-Captain, how close would you need to be to detect the data centers aboard one of our stealth ships?”

  Damien hoped that Rhapsody in Purple and her sister ships were better stealthed than the installation concealed inside the asteroid they were studying. Those ships, however, had active stealth systems for when they wanted to be truly stealthy, systems they couldn’t run all the time.

  This station needed to be as concealed as possible always. Even with complete access, there was no way they could be certain when a random set of sensors from a random civilian ship would be pointed at them—and complete access in a system with Sol’s interlaced jurisdictions was a myth.

  “Assuming they weren’t magically stealthing? Twenty thousand kilometers. Maybe even fifteen,” Denuiad admitted. “I can’t jump with that level of accuracy—even if jumping into the asteroid belt wasn’t asking for trouble.”

  “I’m not expecting you to jump from Mars orbit into the asteroid belt, Mage-Captain,” Damien told her. “I might have been able to do that when I had jump runes, but I have advantages you don’t.”

  And even so, it probably would have been a terrible idea. Jumping out of a planetary gravity well was risky. Jumping into a planetary gravity well was risky—he’d done both with a fleet at the Battle of Ardennes, but it hadn’t been smart. Just necessary.

  None of the gravity wells in the asteroid belt were big enough to be dangerous in themselves, but the combination of hundreds of minimal gravity wells created a huge headache. There was a reason civilian ships usually jumped from at least a light-minute away from any significant masses.

  “Then what are we going to do?” Denuiad asked.

  “Her Majesty will use the Olympus Amplifier to deliver this ship to the relay station,” Damien told them calmly. “Then you will confirm the location of the data center and I will teleport a strike team of Royal Guards to secure that location wh
ile Major Tupi launches an assault boarding of the exterior of the station.

  “Depending on the location of the reactor core relative to either my insertion site or the surface, we will either detach a unit of the Guard or deploy a specific Marine strike force to secure that location.

  “Once the data center and the reactor are in our possession, those units will dig in while Major Tupi’s people clear the rest of the facility. If we find what we’re looking for in the data center, we may need to leave Major Tupi’s people to secure the facility while the rest of us move on the primary target: Nemesis’s actual HQ in Sol.”

  “Which we have no intel on,” Tupi guessed.

  “That’s why we’re hitting the relay station,” Damien confirmed. “Our best guess is that the relay station has less than fifty people aboard and they shouldn’t be equipped to engage exosuited Marines and Guards.

  “Securing the facility should be rapid, but I expect it to be ugly,” he admitted. “We know very little about Nemesis—but I do know that they turned Keepers on each other. And the Keepers successfully turned at least two Hands against the Mountain.

  “I don’t know what motivates them, Major, Mage-Captain…but I expect them to be fanatical in its defense. We can hope for surrenders. I want prisoners.

  “But at the end of the day, I need that data center.”

  “Understood,” Tupi said grimly.

  “The Major is understandably focused on the boarding operation,” Denuiad said slowly. “But I need to go back to the beginning of this ‘non-conventional’ plan. Her Majesty?”

  “At the end of the Eugenicist War, Desmond the First teleported the entire Martian battle fleet from Earth orbit to the Hellas Basin on Mars,” Damien reminded her. “An Alexander sits the throne at Olympus Mons, Mage-Captain Denuiad. Transporting one ship is a tiny fraction of her abilities while she does so.”

  “We live in interesting times,” the Mage-Captain murmured. “I have faith in you and Her Majesty, Lord Regent. I just did not expect the Mage-Queen of Mars to be involved in this operation.”

  “In a sane world, we wouldn’t be bringing the Lord Regent,” Romanov told them. “But we all know Lord Montgomery far too well to expect that.”

  “Believe me, Captain, this is both the best use of Her Majesty’s abilities and the furthest I was able to keep her from this operation,” Damien pointed out. “Remember, these people killed her family.

  “It was all I could do to keep her out of the assault teams!”

  43

  Damien returned to his team on the main flight deck as Duke of Magnificence brought her engines up and headed to a quieter orbit. The Olympus Amplifier was powerful and provided Kiera with a lot of information and flexibility, but it still seemed wiser to reduce the complicating factors at the end of the teleport they could control.

  They couldn’t move the battlecruiser out of Martian space without drawing attention, but orbits shifted all the time—and moving the ship to reduce the people capable of taking potshots at the Lord Regent made sense to everyone.

  Despite standing in the middle of the flight deck surrounded by twenty Royal Guards, most of Damien’s attention was in the throne room of Olympus Mons. His view was taken up by two screens: one showed the bridge of Duke of Magnificence and the other showed Kiera Alexander walking up to the throne at the center of Olympus Mons.

  Captain Denuiad was also on the link with Kiera, but most of the bridge crew was waiting on the Captain’s orders.

  “Are you ready, Your Majesty?” Damien asked as Kiera paused next to the plain stone chair.

  Whatever energies his Sight picked up that allowed him to see magic, they didn’t come through standard video cameras. He had no way of telling if the Mage-Queen had summoned her interface with the Olympus Amplifier or not, but he knew they were all waiting on her.

  “I am.”

  Light sparkled on that video feed as the simulacrum of the solar system burst into existence around Kiera. Damien heard Captain Denuiad inhale in surprise and grinned. The Olympus Amplifier wasn’t actually classified—it was hard to hide the existence of a tool that had turned the tide of a war and terraformed a planet, after all—but the people who’d seen it in action were few and far between.

  The silver flickered, the camera unable to keep up with the way the molten metal changed at Kiera’s command. After a moment, it settled into a clear split between two different “views” of the solar system.

  One was focused on Mars, the support computers highlighting the tiny silver pyramid representing Duke of Magnificence. The other was focused on the relay station, and a dozen more icons were projected across the region around the station from the system.

  Kiera was giving instructions to those markers as Damien watched, assessing distances and analyzing the gravity patterns around her destination.

  Damien held his tongue, wishing he could have done this himself. Kiera had jumped exactly one starship, once—and even that was only because her training was far more advanced than most Mages’ her age.

  This was both more and less complicated than the regular one-light-year jump…and it was critical that it went right.

  “I have you, Mage-Captain Denuiad,” she said aloud in a calm voice. “Please deactivate your engines and release the simulacrum.”

  “Helm, cease thrust,” the Mage-Captain ordered.

  Damien could hear the tremor in Denuiad’s voice as she released the silver model of her ship that hung directly in front of the Captain’s chair. A warship’s bridge was also its simulacrum chamber, the place from which a Mage could fling it between the stars.

  Now, no Mage aboard Duke of Magnificence was touching the simulacrum or linked into the amplifier matrix—and Damien felt the tense, buzzing energy of a ship on the edge of jump anyway.

  “It’s all on you, Your Majesty,” he told her softly. “We’re ready.”

  “Captain Denuiad, if you could give me a five count, please,” Kiera requested. “I’ll be listening on the other end, but I don’t plan on interrupting. You’ll be busy at that point.”

  “That we will,” Denuiad confirmed. “Crew, stand by scanners and jammers. External jump in five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

  “Jump,” Kiera announced softly—and the world moved.

  Damien had personally performed hundreds of jumps himself and been aboard ships being jumped by others for hundreds more jumps. He’d long ago learned that he was far more aware of the process than most people, even before he’d learned the term Rune Wright. It was that awareness that had eventually transformed into the ability to interfere with other people’s jumps.

  But everyone was aware of a jump to one degree or another. It was hard to miss…except this time, several of the people on Duke of Magnificence’s bridge very clearly did miss it for several seconds, before the change in stars and the sudden appearance of an asteroid cluster around them sank in.

  The people in charge of the jamming, fortunately, were more on the ball. Icons on the displays told Damien everyone’s long-range coms were now worthless.

  “Get me scans of that relay station,” Denuiad barked as Damien was confirming the jamming field. “Stand by boarding torpedoes and assault shuttles; I need targets.”

  Even from this close, the station looked dead at first glance. The tactical display being fed to Damien’s helmet continued to update, though, and it became very clear that they’d guessed right. The station was not dead and there’d been a significant degree of excavation into the asteroid anchor.

  “Reactor core located,” someone snapped. “It’s not close to anything.”

  “It’s in the deep interior of the station, well away from anything except rock,” Tupi replied. “I’m launching Alpha Company. Guns, open me a hole.”

  Damien saw what Tupi meant as a red line appeared on the display—Mage-Captain Tupi passing targeting data back to Duke of Magnificence’s tactical department. The reactor section was deep inside the station, yes, but there was only rock bet
ween one side of it and deep space.

  And Duke’s lasers could open a tunnel for the assault shuttles to dive through.

  “Holding for final thermal scans,” the tactical officer replied. “We need…got it. Transferring data center coordinates to Lord Montgomery!”

  They flashed up on his helmet and Damien had his suit computer running the numbers even as one of the battlecruiser’s heavy twelve-gigawatt battle lasers spoke for a carefully calculated fraction of a second.

  The icons for the first wave of assault shuttles were in the hole seconds after the laser stopped firing—and by the time they were diving in, Damien had finished his calculations.

  “Royal Guard, we are jumping,” he snapped. “Are you ready?”

  “Sir!”

  “Now.”

  Like Kiera’s power a moment before, Damien’s magic swept over his strike team and the battlecruiser’s flight deck was gone, replaced by bare stone walls and the blinking lights of a standard server array.

  “Cut the connections to the rest of the facility and start a download,” Romanov ordered after a moment’s silence confirmed they were alone. “First priority: protect this site. Second priority: secure the data.”

  Get out alive was clearly farther down the priority list, Damien noted.

  44

  One advantage of firing a heavy battle laser into the target was that they definitely got everyone’s attention. They were alone in the data center for at least a minute before anyone from the relay station even seemed to notice them.

  By the end of that minute, Tupi’s Alpha Company had touched down and the first waves of exosuited Marines were in the power center. They hadn’t landed unopposed, and Damien’s tactical display was showing red icons moving against them.

  He wasn’t even sure that Tupi could fit all one hundred Marines of the Alpha Company into the power core. More icons on his screen showed that Duke had fired the boarding torpedoes carrying Bravo Company as well. Another hundred Marines were now charging through the surface installation—and the cruiser’s last company was landing on the exterior of the asteroid, moving to secure the receivers and transmitters that made the place a relay station.