Mountain of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  Feeling down his thigh, he found the locked-on pieces of a very secure-feeling brace. His armor must have been holding him together until he was rescued, though he vaguely recalled giving his okay for the cruiser’s doctor to put him under.

  “Is Romanov here?” he asked the red-armored Royal Guard standing at the door. “Or Captain Denuiad. I need to be briefed ASAP.”

  “I’ve already pinged them both,” the Guard replied. “We have this part of sickbay under lockdown, but there’s enough injured that there’s still more traffic than we’re comfortable with.”

  “I’m awake now; it’ll be fine,” Damien told her. “Anything I need to know before Romanov gets here?”

  “I’ve been here since we brought the wounded aboard Duke, my lord,” she admitted. “I’m a bit out of the loop.”

  “Understood, Corporal,” he replied. He recognized her voice, though he couldn’t place her name off the top of his head. “Thank you. I appreciate knowing you’re all watching over me as I sleep.”

  He was used to it by now. It had been Marines and Secret Service before, but it had been a long time since Damien had slept without knowing there were armed officers standing by to protect him.

  It no longer even felt weird.

  The door slid open to reveal a tall blonde doctor whose uniform noted her name as Katherine Kurtz, followed by Denis Romanov in his burgundy uniform.

  “I need to examine him before you start stressing him out,” Dr. Kurtz snapped. “Get back out, Lieutenant. That’s an order.”

  “I’m not in your chain of command, Surgeon-Commander,” Romanov replied dryly. “And if I was, I count as an RMMC Colonel. Carry out your examination, but I need to brief the Lord Regent.”

  “He’s not leaving this room until I clear him,” the doctor replied. “Don’t push your—”

  “I’m leaving this room when I choose to, Doctor,” Damien cut her off. He didn’t speak with any great force. He’d never found it necessary when soft-spoken words would do. “I have no desire to impede your treatments and I intend to be a cooperative patient, Dr. Kurtz, but my duty and my authority override yours.

  “The Lieutenant will brief me while you carry out your exams. He’s seen me naked before, if it comes to that.”

  Romanov snorted. Kurtz death-glared at them both.

  “I could refuse to treat you,” she told Damien.

  “Then Captain Denuiad would send me a doctor who would listen,” he said gently. “I understand your concerns and would do my best to make sure that transition did not impact your career, but I have my duty, Dr. Kurtz. I will perform it.”

  She shook her head and threw another glare at Romanov before stepping over to the bed and starting to check the readouts.

  Taking that as acquiescence, Damien turned his attention to Romanov.

  “What’s our status?” he asked.

  “Alpha and Charlie Companies are back aboard Duke along with all of the Royal Guard,” his subordinate told him. “We have moved all of the server racks from the Nemesis data center to a secured storage unit aboard this ship and have enlisted the ship’s cyberwarfare team in cracking the encryption.”

  “No luck?”

  “None so far. I’m told we should have something within twenty-four hours, but nothing is certain,” Romanov replied. “It’s been five since we left Mars orbit, since I know you haven’t looked at a clock yet.

  “Several of our cyber-people have ripped apart the local hardware on the transmitters, and that is looking promising, but I still don’t have anything definitive,” he continued. “I expect to have a list of the top ten transmission targets within the next few minutes, but without any data on what messages were sent, we can’t be sure what we’re looking at.

  Damien winced as Kurtz poked at his leg.

  “We’re still jamming?” he asked.

  “We are. Sooner or later, someone is going to notice, but so far, we remain covert,” Denis confirmed. “I’d say our best-case scenario is twenty-four hours before we have a target.”

  “Should we be planning to move?” Captain Denuiad asked. Damien had missed her stepping into the room while Denis spoke. “Tupi’s Bravo Company has the station secure and can maintain that until relief. We might draw less attention if we return to Mars orbit.”

  “If we return to Mars orbit, we are assuming the enemy has escaped us,” Damien told them. “Only the fact that no one outside a very select group of allies on Mars knows where we are gives us a chance.

  “As soon as we have a target, we move,” he continued. “We’re assuming there’s a second facility or ship somewhere in the Sol System. I don’t expect a covert relay station to have the kind of files necessary for us to dismantle Nemesis.

  “I do suspect there is somewhere—or someone in the Sol System with those files.”

  He winced again.

  “I don’t know what games you’re playing,” Kurtz told him. “But that brace stays on for seven days at least—and doesn’t come off then without a physician sign-off. Your femur is currently one wrong move away from separating into two pieces.

  “And before you ask, armor won’t fit over it. You can walk, but don’t push that, either.”

  “I understand,” he confirmed. “Am I allowed to leave sickbay?”

  “We do have quarters set aside for you,” Denuiad confirmed. “Your old space has been officially repurposed, but we can set you up somewhere.”

  “I was just unconscious for several hours, Captain; I don’t need to rest just yet,” Damien told her. “We need to be ready to move as soon as we have a target. Do we have a link to Olympus?”

  “Intermittently through a laser link to a Navy sensor platform,” she replied. “Not really good enough for a conversation, though.”

  “All right,” Damien conceded. “I don’t need to talk to Kiera, but we need to keep her informed. Using the Olympus Amplifier to move around is our best option.”

  “That’s so weird,” Denuiad admitted. “I’m used to jumping my own ship around, but even with a warship, moving around in-system is hard.”

  “Trust in the power of the Mage-Queen of Mars,” he told her. “In this system? She can do many things others can not.”

  He and Romanov knew that Damien could do all of those things, but even Denuiad wasn’t cleared for that. She did know he was a Rune Wright, but that didn’t mean she knew all of the complications of that.

  “You can leave,” Kurtz told him. “Check in daily, either with me or with a doctor wherever you end up. That brace should keep you from aggravating the injury, but you’ll heal better if you can rest.”

  “I’ll try,” Damien promised.

  “The scary part is I believe you,” she said with a sigh. “And I still think you’re going to make it worse.”

  “Sir, I just got an update from the team working on the transmitters,” Romanov cut in. “If you can move, I suggest you get dressed. They need to brief us, and I suspect a proper conference room will work better than a sickbay ward.”

  “Give me five?” Damien asked. “Previous experience tells me that dressing with a new medical accoutrement takes some learning.”

  Even using magic, it took him all of those five minutes to actually get dressed in the black suit with its white mock-collar dress shirt that he wore as a uniform. A golden medallion, labeling him as a member of the Mage Guild, was held at his throat by a leather collar that went over the shirt collar. Hung over that was the platinum hand of his old office and the insignia-less chain of his current office.

  Fitting the brace into the suit pants took some doing, but he eventually managed it and limped his way through the corridors to arrive at the briefing in only twice the time he’d promised.

  Romanov had a seat waiting for him and eased Damien into it as soon as he was through the door. The Lord Regent was tempted to wave off the attention, but he also realized that was dumb.

  He was injured. He’d push through it when he needed to, but until then, he’d res
t as best as he can.

  Mage-Captain Denuiad had the seat to his right and Romanov took the seat to his left. Two nervous-looking junior officers, a Commander and a Lieutenant, stood in front of them, and a pair of Royal Guards flanked the door.

  Neither of the presenting officers was a Mage, which was probably part of their nerves.

  “Commander, Lieutenant. I think some introductions are in order,” Damien suggested.

  “This is Commander Chí Phan, our assistant tactical officer, and Lieutenant Blaguna Ivanov, one of our junior coms officers.”

  “I brought Lieutenant Ivanov in on this, as she is one of our systems specialists,” Phan told them all, his tone hesitant. “She knows more about this kind of BIOS software and in-system data storage than anyone else aboard the ship. Her help was critical in establishing the data we’re here to brief you on.”

  Nervous as Commander Phan was, his insistence on crediting the even more nervous-looking junior officer was a checkmark in Damien’s book.

  “What have we learned?” he asked gently, hoping that he could set the two officers at something resembling ease.

  “The transmitters they were using were extremely modern and designed for covert operations,” Phan told them. “Their on-mount storage was automatically wiping every twelve hours. We managed to pull about six hours from them, during which the relay station only made two transmissions.”

  “That doesn’t sound helpful, Commander,” Denuiad noted.

  “That was where Lieutenant Ivanov came into play, sirs,” Phan said. “She was the only one to realize that while the transmission dish was wiping its records every twelve hours, the systems for physically moving and targeting the array were far older.

  “When the UN Expeditionary Fleet set up the initial relay station, they used a standard and cheap dish mobility system—one so reliable that versions of it are still in use today. When Nemesis set up their new systems here, there was no reason to replace it. They cleaned out the surface components and hooked up power again.”

  “And that hardware, sir, was civilian. Originally designed for American exploratory and science missions,” Ivanov said quietly. “It records everything in a special black box with a twelve-month storage capacity. The data drive is old, but it was designed to endure.”

  “We can’t confirm what power levels or anything the array was transmitting at, sirs, but we do know every position that dish has been in for most of the last year,” Phan concluded. “Combined with the orbital mechanics of the station itself, we were able to identify several recurring transmission zones.”

  “How narrow are these zones?” Damien asked.

  “They give us a starting point and not much more,” Phan admitted. “One is in Saturnian orbit, but given the variances and distance…well, it could be anything in Saturn orbit. Another recurring location is in Mars orbit. I’d guess a station or ship positioned near Phobos.”

  Damien sighed. Phobos was the anchor point for significant civilian infrastructure and shipping. Presumably, the relay station had been sending very carefully targeted messages, but they couldn’t identify a target just from knowing which way the dish was pointed.

  “The most common target was in Earth orbit, sir,” the Commander concluded. “As was the transmission we do have data on.”

  “That’s…promising,” Damien said slowly. “Do we have a recipient?”

  “Not confirmed, sir,” Phan admitted. “We’re going through our sensor data for the time window now, but we believe we have narrowed it down to less than ten ships, sir.”

  Ten ships. For a moment, Damien was tempted to send the order to seize them all. If nothing else, there were still two battleships in orbit of Earth. No civilian ship was going to fight them.

  That, of course, was assuming that Nemesis’s base here was as civilian as it appeared. A military-grade amplifier could ruin even a battleship’s day at that range—or allow the ship to jump away.

  “How many jump-ships, Commander?” he asked. “I don’t think our target is going to be a sublight clipper.”

  Phan paused, running through data. After a moment, he put images of the ten ships in question up on the display screen behind him—seven of them disappearing a moment later.

  “Three, sir. A civilian freighter, Runs with Dawning Light. Two personal yachts, Child of Voids and Choirgirl.”

  Damien studied the lines of the ships.

  “Dawning Light isn’t local, is she?” he asked. “When did she arrive?”

  “She arrived in Earth orbit two days ago and is taking on a load of…seawater?” Phan sounded confused.

  “I can think of four uses for it off the top of my head, Commander—but I don’t think a ship that’s just visiting Sol is our target. The yachts. What can you tell me about them?”

  Denuiad was digging into the data on her own wrist-comp and answered the question first.

  “Child of Voids is registered to Sparrowhawk Shipping but looks to be a personal vehicle for the CEO,” she told him. “There’s probably some tax games going on there with the expenses, but she spends seventy-five percent of her time in Earth-local space and has only left the Sol System once in the last year.

  “That’s her listed permanent orbit, but her purpose is silly tourist flights, so she’s all over the place. I could see her as a covert ship for somebody, my lord,” she admitted.

  “Hundred thousand tons, less than eighty meters long,” Damien said aloud as he looked at the data Phan had put up. “Versus Choirgirl, who is almost seven hundred thousand tons. What do we know about her?”

  If he were running a covert base, he’d rather do it with a superyacht than a glorified runabout that happened to be able to jump.

  “Registered to a numbered company,” Phan told him. “I don’t…think that’s unusual?”

  “Probably not. What else have we got?”

  “Records show she’s left Sol roughly once a month for the last year,” the Commander told him. “Again, that’s her permanent assigned orbit. She doesn’t seem to leave it when she’s in Sol, so I’d guess she’s used as an interstellar transport for her owner.”

  “Or a movable permanent residence,” Romanov snorted.

  “Can you map her absences against when the relay was pointed at Earth?” Denuiad asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Several different charts appeared on the screen. Neither was particularly intelligible to Damien, not least because they were moving rapidly. They lined up with each, and a large amount of green was showing up on the screen.

  The room was silent for several seconds as they all looked at the screen and tried to interpret the presented information.

  “Commander?” Damien finally asked.

  “Sir. Every time but one that the transmitter was pointed at Earth in the last twelve months, Choirgirl was present in our estimate of the target zone,” Phan stated firmly. “Comparing against Child of Voids, the ratio is actually lower despite Child having spent a higher portion of her time in Sol.”

  “People, I think that’s enough,” Damien concluded aloud. “I wouldn’t open fire on her based on this, but I think it’s enough for us to bring her in.”

  “Shall we prepare to move to Earth, sir?” Denuiad asked.

  “No,” Damien told her with a smile. “I have a far better idea, Captain. We are going to need to move away from the relay station, though. I need a direct channel to Olympus Mons.”

  48

  “Why do I have a report saying that you were shot?” Kiera demanded as the channel finally opened. There was an almost five-minute delay in the transmission going each way, and Damien was expecting the conversation to take a long time…and then realized that he’d heard the voice from behind him.

  He turned around in the office Denuiad had lent him to see the teenage Mage-Queen standing there, her hands on her hips.

  “You did not just teleport yourself here to scold me,” he snapped. “I need you on Mars.”

  “And I’m on Mars,
” she told him, clearly intentionally putting a hand through the empty bookshelf next to her. “You were first and foremost a Jump Mage, Damien. I studied illusion and projection magic first. Combined with the Amplifier, I can put an avatar anywhere within, oh, ten light-minutes of Mars. Real time. The Amplifier is insane.”

  “I knew that,” Damien conceded. Now that he was looking for it, he could see the signs that Kiera was just an illusion, an artificial creation of magically changed light. She wasn’t quite on the floor, for example, and she wasn’t casting a shadow on the door behind her.

  “You can hear and see me in turn, I take it,” he told her. With a sigh, he shut down the communicator behind him.

  “It’s not easy,” she admitted. “Running this through the Olympus Amplifier is hard, and it’s not a trick I can normally do at more than a few kilometers at best. Projecting is easier than receiving, but I didn’t think we wanted to have this conversation with a ten-minute gap.”

  “Not really,” Damien agreed. “There should be a data package attached to the message I sent you about a ship in Earth orbit.”

  The illusion closed her eyes, probably an intentional sign that Kiera’s attention was on what she was doing on Mars. The illusion was not, he realized, a projection of her actual position or status. It showed what Kiera wanted it to show.

  “Choirgirl, I see,” she said. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent, but I’m sure enough that I’d sign a warrant to detain the entire ship,” Damien replied. “We’ll take control of her, interview the crew, tear apart the computers. It’s never true that the innocent have nothing to fear, but if these aren’t Winton’s people, they’ll be fine and we’ll make it up to them.”

  “And if they aren’t Nemesis, we’ve hit a dead end,” she assumed aloud.

  “We have the relay station’s computers. They’re proving even harder to crack than our worst estimates,” he admitted, “but we’ll open them up eventually. I doubt they’ll have enough for us to bring Nemesis down, but they’ll give a lot more clues.