Mountain of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “Right now, though, Choirgirl is the end of where this chain leads. We can hold off until we have the station’s computers…but I fear we’ll lose the leadership if we do.”

  “That’s not acceptable,” Kiera told him. “I want the assholes who killed my father, Damien. Deliver them to me.”

  “I intend to,” he promised. “But my immediate plan, my Queen, involves you delivering them to me.”

  From the grin that spread across the illusion’s face, Kiera understood exactly what he meant.

  “Attention, everyone!” Damien said loudly as he stepped into the briefing he’d called. “Mage-Captain Denuiad, Major Tupi, thank you for joining me. Romanov, Afolabi, I know you didn’t have a choice, but thank you anyway.”

  “He does know none of us had a choice, right?” Tupi stage-whispered to one of his subordinates. Both of his company commanders that were still aboard Duke had joined them, as had Denuiad’s executive officer.

  “That’s true enough, I suppose,” Damien conceded. “But I appreciate everyone being here. If we’ve guessed right, we’re about to end the little mission that we all left Mars in pursuit of.

  “The bad news, for those of you who haven’t been involved in this mess all along, is that success means we will be boarding a starship operated and crewed by a covert organization that has been proven to have fingers in the highest levels of the Protectorate government.

  “Choirgirl appears to be a relatively normal large personal jump ship,” he continued. “I would guess that she’s set up to pass as that to even a superficial on-board inspection, but vessels of that scale in private ownership are flown by people with the money and contacts to make sure inspections are only superficial.

  “That means we really have no idea what we’re stepping into. Our records show she was built in Amber, which means we have zero chance of getting anything useful from her builders in a reasonable time frame,” Damien told them.

  The Protectorate’s libertarian problem child was demonstrably loyal, but an Amber-based shipyard company would make even the Lord Regent jump through a near-infinite number of hoops to get the design schematics of a ship they’d built.

  If they even had them. A large number of pirate and mercenary ships came out of Amber yards, and those yards had a standard price to include “we destroy all schematics after completing the ship” in the contract.

  “We have to assume that we are boarding the equivalent of one of our own covert-operations ships,” Romanov told the others. “We can expect a minimum of well-equipped, well-trained exosuit soldiers like we encountered here.

  “Mages are almost guaranteed, as are automated defenses and magical security,” he continued. “Nemesis has access to some of our most complex and secret magics. Even I don’t know what kind of surprises we’re going to face, but we need to expect to face surprises.”

  “Is Her Majesty going to deploy us on top of her again?” Denuiad asked.

  “I am uninterested in starting an overt boarding action in Earth orbit,” Damien admitted. “It is in the interests of avoiding that and confusing our enemies that I’ve had you bring Duke to the edge of the asteroid belt.

  “In”—he checked his wrist-comp—“thirty-five minutes, Her Majesty will teleport Choirgirl to us. At that point, we will need to secure her as rapidly as possible. I plan on once again taking an assault team of the Royal Guard to Choirgirl’s data centers.

  “Like the relay station, we need her computers more than anything else, but my presence is required to prevent her from jumping. I leave the rest of the boarding action to the Marines. Tupi?”

  “Standard protocol is engines, life support, bridge; roughly equal priorities,” the Marine CO noted. “We’ll ID them while we’re in flight and send two assault shuttles against each. That will be about sixty Marines on each target, leaving me a twenty-Marine reserve made up of the command teams on the final shuttle.”

  The Marine looked grim.

  “Choirgirl would have a minimum crew of forty and could easily hold three hundred,” he noted. “If all of them are exosuit-trained like the relay crew, we could be in trouble.”

  “I know,” Damien conceded. “We can hold for additional support if needed, Major?”

  “No, we can’t,” Denuiad said quietly. “Apologies, Tupi, I just got the update from coms: Choirgirl has requested clearance to head out-system. Her listed destination is Tau Ceti, but…I doubt its coincidence she’s leaving after we captured the station.

  “If we spook her, she’s gone.”

  “I’ll let Her Majesty know,” Damien promised. “We’ll have reinforcements arriving as quickly as humanly possible once the rocket goes up, but the first wave is just us.”

  The second wave, once he’d let Kiera know, would be the Marine contingents of at least two battleships and probably a dreadnought. This ship was not getting away.

  “If you have any questions, raise them quickly,” he noted. “Her Majesty will act before she’ll allow Choirgirl to escape the system, which means our time frame just dropped drastically.”

  “How are you planning on staying safe aboard the enemy ship, sir?” Tupi asked. “The last report I saw said you can’t run and can’t wear armor.”

  “I didn’t wear an exosuit for most of my career, Major, but that doesn’t mean I’m not wearing armor,” Damien pointed out. “I’ll bring an oxygen system with me as well, but I’ll be fine.

  “We don’t have much choice. We need to secure the data center, and that means I need to take the Guard in. No one else can.”

  “I understand, sir. I just don’t think any of us like it,” the Marine admitted, saying what Damien’s Guards couldn’t quite get away with.

  “The alternative is unacceptable,” Damien told him. “Let’s go.”

  The unacceptable alternative, of course, wasn’t actually to let Choirgirl escape—though that was also unacceptable.

  No, the truly unacceptable alternative was that Kiera was just as capable of the stunt as he was.

  49

  Standard traffic control would require Choirgirl to travel at least one light-minute away from Earth to jump. Even other ships could theoretically create enough of a gravity interaction to complicate the jump, which meant the emptier the space a Mage jumped from, the better.

  If Damien’s suspicions about the yacht were correct, she could leave directly from Earth orbit. One of the most closely held secrets in the Protectorate was that a civilian ship’s jump matrix was a modified form of the amplifiers used by military ships.

  The amplifiers could increase the power of any spell thousands-fold. A jump matrix could only do that to the teleport spell Mages had standardized around for interstellar travel. The restriction was tight enough that some of the spell modifications necessary for a more complex jump spell were nearly impossible with a civilian matrix.

  “She’s accelerating at eight gees,” Denuiad told Damien over the intercom. She was back in her proper place, holding down the central seat in Duke of Magnificence’s bridge. “Everything I’m seeing is almost ten minutes out of date, Damien.”

  “And she’s still over five hours from jump so long as no one spooks her,” Damien replied. The Royal Guard strike team around him were ready. A graphic projected over his wrist-comp was showing him the Marines’ readiness as well.

  There were a lot more Marines than the sixteen Royal Guards, and they weren’t quite all aboard their transports yet. If Kiera followed the original timeline, they had at least twenty minutes.

  Kiera, however, was seeing everything in real time. If something was going to spook Choirgirl’s captain, she’d see it and hopefully react before the presumed Nemesis ship escaped.

  “It is twenty minutes to the planned op time…now,” he told Denuiad. “But if something goes wrong, our friend might just show up here anytime. Are you ready?”

  “Not much of a role for Duke to play in this beyond covering the assault shuttles,” she told him. “What’s the plan for if they t
ry to jump?”

  “Me. Your job is to neutralize any weapons she demonstrates,” Damien told her. “I’m expecting concealed RFLAMs at the very least.”

  “I’m operating on the assumption she’s a concealed pirate, so I expect much the same,” the Mage-Captain confirmed.

  The Rapid-Fire Laser Anti-Missile turrets were designed to take down missiles, but they’d rip the assault shuttles apart all the same. They were common enough on civilian ships that Damien suspected most people didn’t realize that an RFLAM was perfectly capable of threatening a civilian ship, too.

  It was a cheap pirate who relied on those weapons for their task. If nothing else, you had to be close to threaten someone with an RFLAM as opposed to a missile or a proper battle laser.

  There were always cheap pirates—but Damien doubted that Nemesis qualified.

  “My fear, Captain, is that she is hiding real weapons and a real amplifier,” he admitted. “Do we have a plan for that?”

  “We do,” Denuiad confirmed. “I’ll admit our counter-amplifier doctrine is probably lacking, but it’s reassuringly straightforward.”

  Don’t get hit. Unlike with the Olympus Amplifier, someone using a regular amplifier was limited by lightspeed with their incoming data. Their attacks might be instantaneous but their sight wasn’t.

  Unfortunately, today’s plan called for Duke to be very close to the yacht.

  “Ten minutes,” Damien said softly. “Hopefully Choirgirl is going to be very surprised by wha—”

  He felt the magic tear through the space around him before Duke’s sensors saw anything and hoped against hope that Kiera had acted early from paranoia.

  “Jump flare!”

  The red icon flashed into existence on the display in the ready room, and the Royal Guard were on their feet, standing ready as Damien began to run the calculations for the teleport.

  “Jump-ship Choirgirl, we have a warrant for the seizure and search of your vessel,” Captain Denuiad said calmly. “You will stand down all engines and sensors and prepare to receive Marine boarders. Resistance will be met with all necessary force.”

  With his focus on the yacht, Damien felt a now-familiar surge of growing power. It had been in the ship-to-ship battle between Lawrence Octavian’s personal warship and Duke of Magnificence that he’d learned he could sense amplified spells at a surprisingly large distance.

  Disrupting them had been an act of panic then, but he’d practiced it since to make it a reliable skill. The attack spell someone mustered aboard Choirgirl died with barely a whimper, a fireball that would have devastated Duke dissipating back into the yacht’s matrix.

  “They have a full amplifier,” he said calmly. “Target is hostile, I repeat, target is hostile.”

  A second spell flashed into existence. This time, the Mage was clearly aware something had happened to their previous spell and rushed it. Damien couldn’t smother the spell fast enough, so instead, he flung it to the side.

  Instead of exploding inside the battlecruiser, the fireball erupted in deep space.

  At that point, the Mage tried to run. The jump spell flared out from Choirgirl’s core, filling every square centimeter of the yacht…and then Damien yanked it out of her matrix, sending the gathered magical power scattering across the space around her in a spark of light visible to even Duke’s sensors.

  “What was that?” someone demanded.

  “That was their jump spell,” Damien replied. “They need a new Mage in the simulacrum chamber before they can jump now. I need those data-center coordinates, Captain.”

  “Tactical?” Denuiad demanded.

  “Got it!”

  New icons appeared on the schematic of Choirgirl as the Marine assault shuttles blasted into space. Seven small spacecraft lunged toward their victim, and the expected RFLAM turrets lit up.

  One beam hit a shuttle, leaving the ship’s icon flickering with red damage codes, and then Duke’s own weapons spoke. At this range, her battle lasers would have gutted the ship—but her RFLAM turrets were gigawatt-range weapons, twice as powerful as Choirgirl’s civilian system.

  And far more accurately targeted.

  Choirgirl had six of the defensive turrets, and they vanished under Duke’s fire as Damien finished his calculations.

  “Guards, on me,” he ordered aloud. It was an unnecessary order. His bodyguard had already closed around him—and one of them handed him the oxygen mask and tank he’d promised to take.

  Nodding with a smile, Damien slung the system over his shoulder and summoned his magic.

  One step later, everything went to hell.

  50

  Damien knew they were in the wrong place the moment the teleport ended, but gunfire tore through the darkness before he could say a word.

  The next thing he knew, he was on the ground with a pair of exosuited guardians kneeling over him, returning fire at unseen assailants. For a moment, he dazedly wondered why none of the Guards had created magical light—and then he wondered why he was so dazed.

  And then he realized why everything about the situation felt familiar. Samuel Finley had set up the exact same trap in the Daedalus Complex, using a set of complex runes only a Rune Wright could create to draw any teleport to the same designated location.

  He’d used a different set of runes to disable the Gift of any Mage in the trap. As a Rune Wright, he’d had enough understanding of his own Gift to exclude himself from the effect. Here, it seemed, someone had built the same trap and fitted it with guns.

  Lots of guns.

  Damien focused, pushing through the spell muffling his power, and threw a brilliant light into the air. The runes couldn’t fully suppress his power, not with the Runes of Power augmenting his strength.

  But it was enough to muffle the Royal Guard, and several of the exosuits had fallen to the ground with a disturbing finality. With a broader light than the usually unused headlamps, the remaining Guard could locate the automated weapons firing on them.

  Heavy-penetrator rounds went through the computerized weapons and the walls behind them. Damien’s own magic joined the fray, but the weapons weren’t his target. None of the Guards could see the runes that surrounded them, certainly not with enough understanding to break the matrix and free them.

  Blades of force peeled away sections of wall while penetrator rifles flayed the guns, and then, finally, there was blessed silence. The matrix broke a moment later and Damien breathed a sigh of relief as his full power returned to him.

  The squad of exosuited Nemesis troopers who rounded the corner, presumably sent to finish the job the trap started, didn’t share his relief. Damien’s power flared down the corridor, ball lightning that hammered into each of the half-dozen soldiers with enough force to burn out their armor…and their nervous systems.

  “We need to locate ourselves,” he barked. “Romanov, report.”

  “We’re down six,” the Guard-Lieutenant said grimly—and there was pain in his voice. “That’s dead, my lord. Most of the rest are wounded, but the suits will hold us together.

  “What the fuck happened?”

  “It seems Finley was friends with Nemesis,” Damien told him. “This is the same trap he pulled on me at Daedalus…but I’m afraid I brought you all in with me. We’re stuck, Denis. I can’t teleport us out without ending up right back here.”

  He’d shredded the runes that suppressed magic, but he’d need a lot more time and access to destroy the matrix that trapped teleports.

  “Coms are down,” his bodyguard reported. “We need local computers. Where they were coming from?” Romanov suggested.

  “Agreed. Let’s move.”

  It was a slow procession. Damien had expected to slow the process down with his leg brace, but it looked like he was in the middle of the pack now. Damaged suits and damaged limbs held his people back, but they were moving and they had their magic back.

  The first attempt at an ambush underestimated the Royal Guard and Damien. They turned a corner, searching f
or a computer link of any kind, and then Damien held up a hand as he sensed something.

  “Wait…someone’s playing clever games. Romanov—spray the corridor!”

  The Guards obeyed, and the troopers concealed under the Mage’s spell didn’t react in time. Half of them were down before the illusion collapsed, but the survivors returned fire—only for their bullets to hammer uselessly into the Guards’ defensive shields.

  It was over in moments and another dozen Nemesis troopers were dead.

  “Where the hell did he get this many fanatics?” Romanov murmured.

  “A hundred billion human beings,” Damien countered. “Have a cause people can believe in, and that’ll produce a lot of people willing to die for you.”

  “Yeah, but what is their cause?”

  “I don’t know,” the Lord Regent admitted. “And I think I need to. Console there! Someone get me a goddamn map!”

  “We’re nowhere bloody near the data center,” the Guard who’d rigged a cable into the console reported. “They put their trap as far away from anything useful as they could. We’re at the ‘top’ of the ship, almost the full length from the engines and life support, and the full height from the data center.

  “The only thing we’re remotely close to is the swimming pool they keep to distract the Inspectors.”

  “Show me the map,” Damien ordered. The Guard tapped a few commands on her invisible keyboard, and a holographic projection of the schematics appeared in front of them.

  “We’re closest to the simulacrum chamber,” he told them, tapping the space at the center of the ship. “Most likely the bridge and also the biggest threat to Duke.”

  He hadn’t felt any attempt by the amplifier to attack his cruiser or teleport out, but that didn’t mean anything. They’d only been aboard for a few minutes and they might have had to wake their other Mages up.

  “With Marines on the way, they’ve already triggered the purge order on their data. We need to salvage this situation as best as we can,” he continued. “That’s prisoners and as much of the data as we can retrieve.