“Follow me,” Wong Ken told Damien. “Our people will take care of your Marines – you’re welcome to bring a couple if you’d like, but there’s not a lot of space in the House’s secured facility.”
“Amiri, Lieutenant Nguyen, pick two of your men,” Damien instructed. The traditional almost wordless communication of soldiers followed, and he soon had a small party of four trailing him as he followed the Governor’s husband into the house.
Wong led them through a white marble lobby that seemed subdued for a planetary governor’s residence to an apparently plain wall underneath one of the curved staircases. He placed his hand against a whorl in the stone Damien would have thought was perfectly natural otherwise. A moment later, a six foot wide section of stone recessed into the wall and slid aside to reveal an elevator.
“After me, please,” Wong repeated and stepped into the elevator.
The elevator dropped like a stone, rapidly releasing them into an underground corridor carved directly from the stark white stone of the native cliff. The floor had been laid with a decorative, hard-wearing, carpet – but the walls and roof had simply been smoothed and polished.
The effect was more impressive than any decoration that could have been done. Damien estimated the bunker was a hundred meters beneath the surface, but it was in many ways more attractive than the surface buildings.
Security at this point was less concealed. A security barrier, manned by two uniformed soldiers and backed by a ten-centimeter-thick blast door, blocked the way further into the bunker.
The two soldiers quickly checked the IDs of the three Míngliàng officials, despite likely seeing the same three every day, and then asked for Damien’s. Wordlessly, he dropped the golden fist icon of his office onto their reader, which promptly beeped cheerfully and declared him cleared with no further confirmation.
“Sir, we need some form of visual identification,” one of them ventured carefully.
“Soldier, the Hand is only active if it’s been exposed to the correct DNA in the last thirty or so seconds,” Damien told him quietly. “Believe me when I tell you that it’s more certain of my identity than your scanner ever could be.”
“I know who they all they all are, son,” General Avery told his soldier cheerfully. “I’m not sure they even have ID other than that Hand our systems would recognize. Clear them through – the Governor’s expecting us all.”
“I have to log this as a protocol exemption,” the soldier said stubbornly, and Damien stepped up to the man. For all that the guard was easily ten inches taller than Damien’s, he looked nervous as the Hand gestured for him to lean in.
“My people have Protectorate government ID,” he murmured. “Your system should read it just fine. We are in a hurry, though, so faster is better.”
#
Damien couldn’t help pausing in the door of the conference room Wong Ken had led them to. Either whoever had designed Míngliàng’s emergency command center had also designed Ardennes’ emergency command center or had stolen from the same inspirations.
The room was identical to the space in which, bare months before, Damien had gambled for fifty million lives. He’d won, and Ardennes was dramatically improving as they cleaned up after years under their corrupt Governor, but it was still a shock to see an almost-identical place.
It was only a moment, though, and as he walked further into the room he could see the differences. Where Ardennes had used immense screens, Míngliàng’s center had several giant holographic displays. Where Ardennes’ center had been abandoned moments before he’d entered it, here half a dozen technicians and officers busied themselves reviewing the status of every spaceborne object in the system.
Right now, the central holo-tank was showing the image of a woman in the black and blue of the Míngliàng Security Flotilla with pitch-black skin and hair and a pair of gold stars on either side of her collar.
“Ah, I see Hand Montgomery and his people have arrived,” the man in a black business suit talking to Admiral Yen Phan announced. He was a pale-skinned man with slanted eyes and a shaven head, and his gaze and smile were mostly for Wong Ken as he approached the newcomers.
Wong Lee, elected Governor of the planet and star system of Míngliàng, kissed his husband swiftly but determinedly, and then turned his attention to Damien.
“I hope you are here to answer our complaint, my lord Hand,” he said bluntly. “The situation has degraded since we sent our missive to Mars.”
“For the moment, I am here to listen,” Damien replied. “I am here to review evidence and study the situation. What action will be taken depends on what I judge to be required.”
Wong Lee grunted and gestured towards the tank with his chin. “Follow me, then, Lord Montgomery. You need to hear what Phan has to say.”
Damien inclined his head to the Admiral in the holo-tank. Unlike the ship’s Captain standing next to her, Phan did not wear the gold medallion marking her as a Mage. Given that only Mages could jump the starships, a non-Mage officer in command of an interstellar deployment was rare. Phan’s command of the MSF spoke to either competence or connections.
Either way, she was not to be taken lightly.
“Admiral Phan,” he greeted her. “I understand you have just returned to Míngliàng.”
“Indeed,” she replied. “As Governor Wong states, you need to understand what has happened. We have exchanged fire with Sherwood warships.”
Slowly, carefully, Damien reached the tank and looked up to meet Phan’s eyes. He’d been afraid of that. Not much else would have dragged the Governor away from meeting a Hand of the Mage-King of Mars.
“Explain,” he ordered. “Start at the beginning.”
Chapter 7
Admiral Yen Phan brought up a three-dimensional star map next to her in the holo-tank. Two stars flashed green – Damien recognized them as Míngliàng and Antonius. A broad orange ribbon connected the two stars and Phan tapped it.
“Given the incidents over the last year, we’ve provided our freighters with a specific series of jump points to use for the transit between Antonius and Míngliàng,” she explained crisply. “This has allowed us to maintain patrols that are in reasonable sensor range of where the ships will be.”
She paused, then shook her head.
“This would be more successful if the pirates didn’t seem to know exactly what our patrol schedules were,” she admitted. “We’ve had four attacks since implementing the patrols, and we’d never had a destroyer close enough to see anything until today.”
The map zoomed in on a specific point on the orange ribbon, three jumps out from Míngliàng and five from Antonius.
“This last run was a two-ship patrol I arbitrarily decided to launch without notice or warning to anybody,” Phan noted. “We arrived at Jump Three roughly two and a half days before the next scheduled sweep of the point and found the freighter Dreamer under close attack by a Sherwood frigate.”
“Show me,” Damien ordered, stepping closer to the hologram.
The star map and orange ribbon faded away to a tactical display. Four icons blinked on it – the two Míngliàng Security Flotilla ships, the Dreamer, and one unknown flashing red. Sensor codes, the standard ones from the Protectorate Navy, appeared on the hologram, denoting weapons fire.
“We detected six-gigawatt laser fire,” the MSF Admiral said calmly. “Prior to our arrival, they may have been trying to take the ship intact. Once they detected us, however…”
The tactical display icons told the story. The Dreamer had been a Venice-type freighter, similar to the one Damien had left Sherwood on years ago. It wasn’t capable of surviving sustained battle laser fire and the icon flashed and disappeared as he watched.
“They sustained fire on the Dreamer for approximately twenty-six seconds,” Phan continued, her voice oddly flat. “At those power levels, that barely leaves debris, lord Hand.”
“I know,” Damien said quietly. “I’ve seen it. What did you do?”
�
��They were in the act of piracy and murder,” Admiral Yen Phan told him coldly. “I ordered my ships to open fire. We were at extended missile range, but given my ships likely couldn’t sustain a close engagement with a frigate, it seemed safest.”
As she spoke, the icons flashed onto the display. Phan’s ships fired forty-eight missiles, and the Sherwood vessel replied with sixty. It was a heavy salvo for a vessel of the frigate’s size, but Damien’s information on the ships noted their extremely heavy missile armament. The frigates were designed to kill ships with heavy laser armaments from well outside laser range.
That also made them quite effective against ships trying to use an amplifier matrix as a weapon like, say, the warship of the Royal Martian Navy.
“You survived, I presume,” he noted dryly.
“They withdrew after a single salvo,” Phan reported. “Our missiles didn’t even reach them before they jumped, and I decided to do the same. We might have been able to weather the salvo, but with the complete destruction of the Dreamer, there was no point in hanging around.”
Damien nodded slowly, watching the ships vanish off the plot.
“Did you get visual confirmation on the ship?” he asked.
“What?” Phan demanded.
“You have military-grade long-range optics aboard your vessels,” Damien pointed out. “Did you get visual confirmation that you were engaging a Sherwood frigate? Energy signatures and armaments can be faked, after all.”
“I did not. Sherwood has been destroying our ships for months, and you want me to prove it was them?”
“Admiral,” the Hand said coldly, “all I have seen before today is supposition and conjecture, not proof. I will not – I can not – condemn star systems based on that. The involvement of a Sherwood frigate in the destruction of the Dreamer is damning indeed – but I need incontrovertible proof, beyond not just reasonable but any doubt, before I take the responses this action requires.”
“So our people are just to keep dying until you have your proof?” the Governor demanded. “This is not the response I expected from Mars!”
“I did not say that,” Damien pointed out. He stared at the holo-tank which had just shown the death of a ship very like the one he’d once served on, then turned to hold the Governor’s gaze. “I will not bring the Navy in and force the Patrol to disband on this evidence,” he continued, “which if I had incontrovertible evidence would be the response.”
Wong Lee returned Damien’s glare but, finally, nodded.
“You have other options then, I presume?” he demanded.
“I do,” Damien confirmed. “First, I will want all of the information you have on all of the attacks forwarded to the Duke of Magnificence. My staff and I will need to review it before I decide on my next steps.
“Understand me,” he said calmly, “I am not questioning if your ships are being attacked. I am concerned that we may be leaping to conclusions as to the perpetrator – and I am not allowed to leap to conclusions.”
“I understand, my lord Hand,” Admiral Phan allowed, her voice cold. “I suspect that once you have reviewed our data, you will understand why the Sherwood Interstellar Patrol is the only possible suspect.”
#
Damien had taken over an empty office in the above-ground portion of Government House and begun the process of reviewing the data Míngliàng had provided. A team of Mage-Captain Jakab’s people on the Duke were reviewing it from a military perspective, but Damien wanted his own eyes on it.
Except for the attack the previous day, there was no smoking gun in the data. A total of twenty-one attacks now, each completely destroying a merchant ship. Some ships were larger, others smaller, but all told almost two thousand people – forty-five of them Mages – had died.
There were common threads. All the destroyed ships had been on the Antonius-Míngliàng route. All were based on Míngliàng – where other systems’ ships carried cargo from Antonius they went un-molested.
When the attacks had started, four ships a day had arrived in Míngliàng from the mining outposts. Now, two or three days passed between ships. In the aftermath of the Dreamer’s destruction, Admiral Phan was ordering the establishment of a convoy system – it would now be almost a week between shipments, but the ships would fly under escort.
Unfortunately, as the Dreamer’s fate had demonstrated, the Míngliàng Security Flotilla’s destroyers couldn’t engage Sherwood’s frigates. If the attackers were Sherwood privateers, those convoy escorts would need to be fully half the MSF’s strength to be able to stand off one frigate.
Other than that the ships were Míngliàng vessels traveling from Antonius, Damien didn’t see a clear pattern. Some of the ships had been mostly intact when found, their crews murdered and their cargoes stolen – but their black boxes and sensor records removed. Others, like Dreamer, had simply ceased to exist.
The damage, where ships were found, was inconsistent with the attack that Admiral Phan had witnessed – six-gigawatt battle lasers didn’t leave wreckage. The damage did, however, match up with the half-gigawatt weapons that both the MSF and the SIP’s ships used for missile defense.
None of the material evidence prior to Phan witnessing the last attack unequivocally pointed to Sherwood. A lot of systems had a handful of destroyers, usually built in either Tau Ceti or Sol, and any of those ships could have carried out the attacks. Damien wasn’t even prepared to exclude the possibility of one of those ‘export’ destroyers ending up in pirate hands, though most pirates flew modified civilian ships.
The last attack though. They had the MSF’s military-grade sensor data on the attacker. Sadly, the high-powered optics that would have provided visual confirmation were a secondary system that a human had to activate. One no one had thought of at the time.
The scan data was as solid as it was likely to be. The emissions scans were fragmentary, but the energy signatures, performance parameters, and weapons used all fit the profile for a Hunter-class frigate.
But… many of the scans were fragmentary, broken, diffused, or confused. The ship had been running its electronic warfare suite at full power – hardly necessary for dealing with one small freighter. Everything fit the profile for a Sherwood frigate, but with that level of ECM it could have been another vessel specifically trying to look like one.
Or… or the Hand born on Sherwood was grasping at straws to avoid condemning his home world. Damien stepped up to the window, looking out at the light of Míngliàng’s two small moons reflecting off of the water in the dark.
He had all of the data. He just wasn’t liking his answers.
#
“Did he leave at any point?” Julia asked the Marine, a Corporal Ashley Williams, standing guard outside Montgomery’s co-opted office.
“Bathroom break during Corporal Anders’ shift,” the young blond woman replied promptly. “Not since I took over three hours ago though, Agent.”
Julia shook her head. That wasn’t what she meant, though the detail suggested that the Marines were keeping as careful an eye on her Hand as she was.
“Any trouble from the locals?”
“Not a peep,” the Marine said. “They gave us full access to the House’s security feeds, too. One of Sergeant Tomlin’s people is in their main security center. They’re being perfectly cooperative so far as we can tell.”
“It’s like they want something,” the ex-bounty hunter muttered, then shook her head at the Marine’s questioning look. “I’ll let you know if we need anything,” she told the younger woman.
“Should I have food sent up?”
Julia laughed, considering the young man on the other side of the door.
“Good idea. Food and coffee,” she agreed.
Giving the Corporal a thankful nod, Julia stepped into the office. The first thing she noticed was the view – the office was on the corner of the top floor of Government House facing the ocean. Míngliàng the star was slowly rising over the horizon of Míngliàng the planet, lighting up the
oceans in a glittering array of blue and gold. The office was comfortably, if plainly, appointed and had an incredible view – she doubted it had ‘just happened’ to be free for the Hand’s use.
Julia was not at all surprised to see Damien Montgomery face-first in his hands on that comfortable desk. A glass of water, mostly empty, sat just beyond his reach, and the desk’s holo-display was paused at the end of a replay of the encounter at Míngliàng-Antonius Jump Three.
Asleep over his desk, the Hand looked far younger than his roughly thirty years. The slight twitch to his eyes that rippled through his muscles added to that impact – Julia knew how old and tired the gaze in those eyes was these days.
Montgomery jerked suddenly, falling out of his chair and flinging it away from the desk as something in his dreams startled him. Julia was fast enough to grab him before he hit the floor, but not fast enough to grab the chair – which promptly crashed into an empty bookcase in a clatter of falling shelves.
“Wait, what?”
“Wake up, Damien,” Julia told him, helping one of the most powerful men alive to his feet. “Nightmare?”
Montgomery’s lips twisted.
“Yeah.”
To her knowledge, Julia was the only person aware of Hand Montgomery’s nightmares. She hadn’t been supposed to have been aware of Hand Stealey’s nightmares when she’d worked for her, but she had been. The Special Agent figured they were part of the job.
“Find anything useful?” she gestured towards the display.
“Yes,” he admitted. “Just not anything I like. I’ll wait for Jakab’s people for the final call, but I’d say it was almost certainly one of Sherwood’s frigates. The whole situation doesn’t make sense to me, but Wong has clear grounds for his petition.”
“Food and coffee are on the way,” Julia told her boss, grabbing his chair. “Want me to grab Christoffsen?”
“Not yet,” the Hand replied, running his hands over his face. “Food is good. Coffee’s better. Need to think.”
Voice of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 3) Page 5
