“I was glad to see the Alan-a-dale return,” she told him. “Captain Wayne is one of my best officers – he brought over most of his crew from his old merchant ship, and they’re one of, if not the, best drilled crews I have.
“But, most importantly, Alan-a-dale was the ship that discovered the Wil Scarlet’s fate,” she continued, “and while we keep backup copies of all of the black box data, I figured you’d be more comfortable with a direct, complete, download of the Alan-a-dale’s box back to commissioning.”
“It’ll make Mage-Captain’s Jakab’s analysts happy,” Damien agreed. “The cleaner the data the harder it is to hide anything.”
“We’re not hiding anything,” McLaughlin snapped, and sighed. “We really aren’t, Damien. I know you can’t believe that, but…”
Damien looked away from her, focusing on the data on the screen as it filled with the image of the Alan-a-dale. Sherwood’s frigates were odd ships to his eyes, a long uneven curve on top with a flat bottom and stern, where the Protectorate used even-sided pyramids. That curve mounted a lot more weapons than any given side of a Protectorate ship, but a frigate was vulnerable if approached from ‘beneath’ – though in space, they’d presumably see an attack coming in plenty of time to rotate the ship.
“Wait,” he said aloud as he reviewed the numbers the screen was showing. “This says the Alan-a-dale returned missing two full salvoes of missiles?” He checked the dates. The patrol was just the right timing for them to have clashed with Admiral Yen Phan three jumps out from Míngliàng.
“They’re authorized to expend missiles on live fire exercises,” Grace pointed out. “Like the Royal Martian Navy, I subscribe to the theory that the best training for a crew in firing their weapons is for them to fire their weapons. You’ll note she came back with a full stockpile of antimatter warheads.”
“I doubt I need to tell you that the warhead is almost incidental on a full velocity Phoenix missile,” Damien said quietly. “Can you be certain Captain Wayne did test-fire those missiles?”
“I trust Michael completely,” she replied. “But, if you give me a moment…”
She tapped away on her wrist computer for a moment, and then the screen resolved into the black of space. It split into multiple different windows, several showing visuals of the space outside Alan-a-dale, others showing her sensor data, her location and her status according to her internal sensors.
Seconds after the screen changed, missiles blasted away, shooting into empty space. A second salvo followed half a minute later.
“See?” she asked triumphantly. “I have full records of every live fire test, every jump, everywhere my ships have been and what they’ve done. I know my people haven’t been attacking anyone’s shipping.”
“Show me the Wil Scarlet,” Damien said after a long moment’s thought. “What happened to her?”
“I had that one as a canned routine,” the woman at the table told him with a smile as she hit a button. Once again, the screen showed the Alan-a-dale, but now the space it showed wasn’t empty.
There wasn’t much in it. Antimatter explosions didn’t leave a lot of debris. Damien studied both the visual and the sensors with a practiced eye. Everything looked right, but…
“You said they retrieved the black box?” he asked. “There’s not a lot of intact debris, I’m surprised it survived.”
“Captain Vlahovic apparently ejected the box when he realized the battle was lost,” Grace said after a long moment. “We don’t actually have the ship’s destruction on record, though it’s pretty obvious,” she gestured at the screen.
“Show me,” Damien ordered.
With a sigh, she nodded and hit another command. The Alan-a-dale vanished, replaced with the same data and screens for another ship – the Wil Scarlet. The feed was paused, showing the situation in the frigate’s final moments.
Eight ships, all one megaton destroyers, had the frigate surrounded. Missile salvos were sweeping in from six different angles and the weakness of the Hunter’s design was clear. Against a single enemy or formation of enemies, a Hunter could orient herself to face them. Surrounded, ambushed by a prepared enemy, there was no way the Wil Scarlet could maneuver to defend herself.
McLaughlin entered more commands and a new screen appeared – one showing the bridge of the frigate. Captain Vlahovic was a tall man with black hair down to his shoulders, surprisingly obese for his height and role.
The video started playing, and Vlahovic was speaking.
“Unidentified vessels, this is the Wil Scarlet,” he snapped, his voice desperate. “We surrender. I repeat, we surrender.”
“No response, sir.”
“Damn.” Vlahovic’s voice was very quiet, empty of all hope. “Stand by all point defenses. Eject the secondary black box – let’s hope that someone finds out what happens to us.”
“Ejecting… now.”
The image froze again.
“Debris and radiation patterns suggest the detonation of in excess of forty antimatter warheads,” Grace noted softly. “If he’d ejected the box any later, we would have had no data at all. Our analysis says those are Tau Ceti-built ships, and the only people for fifty light years in any direction with enough of those to spare eight for any mission are the Míngliàng Security Flotilla.”
She glared at him across the table.
“My people are dead, Damien,” she snapped. “Spacers under my command. Merchants under my protection. For God’s sake, Damien – Kyle is dead.”
They were both silent after that. Damien hadn’t known. Kyle McLaughlin was technically Grace’s uncle, but he’d been the same age as Damien and Grace – he’d shipped out on the same freighter as Grace had.
“I didn’t know,” he admitted.
“Never seen anyone else take to the merchant life so well,” she said softly. “Left the Gentle Rains after eighteen months – about when I came home – to be XO on another ship. Had his own ship two years ago. Was on a run home six months ago. Never made it.” She shook her head. “Too many dead, Damien. And you tell me you don’t trust us?”
“Míngliàng has as many dead and more,” he reminded her, his voice very soft. “Grace, I have unaltered footage that unquestionably shows a Sherwood frigate killing innocent spacers. I want to trust you,” he continued, his voice so fierce it surprised even him.
“I want to believe you,” he told her, and it was so true it hurt. “But I have evidence that says that at least one of your Captains is murdering people.”
“Then give me a copy,” she snapped. “You can run it against emissions profiles and black box data for years, but if they’ve done a good enough job, you’ll never nail down the ship. My analysts have months of data – from ship sensors, from builder scans, from the system defense net. Give me what you have – I’ve as good a chance to identify the ship as you do – if not better.”
Suddenly she was holding his hands, pleading.
“Please, Damien,” she said softly. “If one of my people is doing this, let me help find them – and if I do, I will by God hand-deliver Governor Wong’s invitation to their hanging.”
She was right. Even if he couldn’t trust her – and despite all logic and reason, everything told him he could – giving her the data couldn’t hurt.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “I’ll make sure you get a copy. I will find the perpetrators, Grace – whether they’re rogue factions, criminals, or system government, I will find those who killed Kyle and everyone else. I promise you that.”
Somehow they’d stepped away from the table, but their hands were still together. She’d also taken her gloves off to eat, he noticed, and her skin was warm against his. She was very, very close – well within arm’s reach.
She was short, but he was even shorter. He found himself leaning his head upwards and both of them started to move towards each other…
Then the floor exploded outwards – and Damien realized that Grace’s office was right at the outer hull.
&nb
sp; Chapter 16
Everything seemed to move in slow motion, with Damien’s brain registering everything. First, the explosion was too neat, too perfect to be an accident. Someone had run a line of foam explosive around the exact outline of the office from the outside of the hull and detonated it one blast.
The entire floor of the office dropped into space, flung free by the centripetal force of the spinning ring. The furniture, the air, and Damien and Grace followed it. He could feel the air escaping, scattering into the surrounding void.
There was a time to be circumspect, to conceal power so your enemies underestimated you – and there was a time to act.
The Runes of Power inlaid into his flesh warmed against his flesh as he channeled energy. He didn’t care about the furniture or the floor. He cared about Grace – and he cared about oxygen.
A ball of force slammed into place around them, rapidly contracting to catch the fleeing air and freezing as a sphere perhaps four meters across, half the size of the office itself. He pulsed energy gently against his shield, confirming that it would hold, and then brought up a tester on his computer.
“Point seven atmospheres,” he said aloud. “We’ll live.”
A second command activated his emergency beacon as he looked out into the void around them. There wasn’t much he could do about their momentum, and their explosive ejection from Ring One had flung them into space with the full force of the station’s rotation.
“How did you…?” McLaughlin trailed off, her eyes wide as she looked at him. “We should be dead, Damien.”
“Or shortly, if not yet,” he agreed. There was no gravity. He could provide some, but the air bubble was a strain to maintain on its own. These days, his limit was more how long he could sustain a flow of magic, not how much he could channel.
“How?”
“Bubble of force, holding the air in.”
“That’s imp…” she started.
“Not easy,” he corrected sharply. He could feel his breath growing shorter too, and his computer happily informed him they were already starting to run low on oxygen. “I don’t have much energy to spare if I’m to sustain this for long,” he continued. “But we are burning our oxygen fast. Can you scrub?”
Damien saw her magic flare, a sight only the handful of Rune Wrights in the galaxy could ever share, as she answered by doing. The carbon scrub spell was a simple one, taught to almost every Mage alive just in case they ended up in an enclosed space or on a spaceship where the filters broke.
A few moments after her energy began to mingle with his, the oxygen counter on his computer started ticking back up into safe zones.
“Thank you,” he said softly.
“I was not anticipating this when I asked you to meet with me,” Grace said frankly. “Someone just tried to kill us. Explosive decompression…” she shivered. “I guess it’s a reliable way to kill a Mage. I would have thought it was a reliable way to kill a Hand. Damn it, Damien – you’re a weaker Mage than me. How?”
“I was a weaker Mage,” Damien told her gently. “Now I am a Hand.” He hesitated and then sighed. “And that is all I am permitted to tell you.”
The very existence of the Rune Wrights, the Mages who could read the true flow of magic instead of the crude script humanity had created to chain it, was classified. He was the only one who wasn’t a direct descendant of the first Mage-King of Mars. Careful genetic engineering had kept the Gift active in that line, but the geneticists responsible for that engineering had practically salivated over the samples they’d got from Damien while he’d been at Olympus Mons.
“All you are permitted to tell me?” she repeated.
“Are you truly surprised that the Hands are privy to secrets we cannot share?” Damien asked. “We stand at the side of the Mage-King of Mars, Grace. I have seen things both wondrous and terrible that I cannot speak of.”
“Fine,” she said shortly. “So what happens now?”
“I can’t move us without spending air I’d like to breathe,” he said dryly. “So we wait. My emergency beacon is active, Julia will find us.”
“SAR is my people’s responsibility, not hers.”
“Amiri is a Secret Service Agent responsible for the security of a Hand in danger,” Damien replied. “Your people don’t have jurisdiction.”
“She’s very dedicated,” Grace said neutrally. “Are you and she…?”
It took Damien a long moment to realize just what his ex was asking.
“No,” he finally replied with a laugh. “She’s dating a politician on Ardennes – the man we’re currently grooming to be the next Governor, though the election could theoretically go against him.”
“Oh,” Grace replied, suddenly seeming more relaxed. “Nobody, then?”
“Not since the Blue Jay,” Damien admitted. He remembered having to say goodbye to Kelly far too vividly to risk anything else.
“Damn… wait, blond named Kelly? Green eyes, legs out to here?” The gesture proved to be ill-advised without gravity and it took Grace a moment to arrest her spin.
“Yeah, why?”
“I almost took service on Captain Rice’s new ship before Grandfather called me home,” she told him. “We were in Tau Ceti as he was about to leave in the Peregrine and he was recruiting multiple Mages. I went home instead in the end, but not until after I’d met the officers. Kelly was asking questions about Sherwood, guess she must have been trying to find out if I knew you.”
The thought of Kelly and Grace having extended discussions about him was… more nerve-wracking than it should have been to one of the Mage-King’s top enforcers.
“Guess so,” he admitted. “Been a while. You have anyone?”
The question came out before he could stop himself. He wasn’t entirely sure, but he thought she’d been about to kiss him before the floor had exploded.
“Captain Wayne and I were, um, almost an item,” she admitted softly. “Then I got promoted to Commodore. He still doesn’t seem to get that the head of the Patrol can’t be with a ship CO. It’s been… enough of an issue for me to be glad nothing happened. Otherwise, nothing in years.”
Damien nodded. The conversation helped to distract him from the fact that they were stranded, floating in the void with his magic their only protection.
He’d had better days.
#
Julia barged into the on-station command center without paying much attention to the pair of Patrol guards outside. Their protests died off as they spotted Gibbons following in her wake, and she stormed across the floor to the central command dais.
“What the hell is going on?” she snapped at the trio of Patrol officers standing there. “Where are the SAR shuttles? Why is everyone still just sitting here?”
“Who is this?” a sandy-blond man in a Captain’s uniform demanded. “This is a secure facility.”
“I am Special Agent Julia Amiri,” Julia told him. “Now, are you going to tell me why no one is out looking for the Hand and the Commodore, or are you taking a rapid trip to the Duke’s brig?”
“I am Captain Michael Wayne, and with the Commodore out of the picture, I am the acting commander of the Patrol,” he replied. “Now that we’ve beaten our chests, why don’t you get out of the way and let the professionals do their job? This is a murder investigation at this point, Agent. Attempting to retrieve the bodies risks running into traps laid by the attacker. We will retrieve them, but for now securing the safety of this station is more important than recovering my friend’s body.” His voice twisted with the last few words and he glared at Julia.
“You are making two incorrect assumptions here, Captain,” Julia told him, trying to be polite as the Captain appeared more than a little upset. “Firstly, you are assuming that the assassination attempt succeeded.”
“The entire contents of Commodore McLaughlin’s office and apartment were blasted into space, Agent,” Wayne said gently. “No one, not even a Mage, could survive that.”
“Damien Montgomery
is no mere Mage,” she snapped. “He is a Hand, Captain Wayne – underestimate him at your peril.
“Perhaps even more importantly, his emergency beacon was manually activated forty-eight seconds after the breach,” she pointed out. “My Hand is alive, Captain Wayne. Which means that Commodore McLaughlin is almost certainly alive. Every second you waste risks that changing.”
“I see,” he said slowly, exhaling a deep breath. “I’ll need to see that beacon, Agent,” he said bluntly. “I want to believe you, but you’re asking me to put people’s lives at risk.”
“I’m not asking, Captain, because your second assumption is that you are in charge here,” Julia snapped, gesturing for Williams to join her. The Marine had quite sensibly refused to be disarmed, which Gibbons appeared to have backed her on as no one was injured.
“As a Protectorate Secret Service Agent whose principal is in danger, I am assuming full jurisdiction of this investigation and rescue effort,” she said formally. “Check the Charter for my authority if you’d like, Captain, but first get me a shuttle.”
He blinked at her, but the woman standing next to him, clad in a different dark blue uniform, shrugged at him.
“She’s right, sir,” the older woman replied. “With a Hand in danger, this is Protectorate jurisdiction.”
“Then get her the damn shuttle,” Wayne snapped at her, striding away to review some other aspect.
“I’ll need your station sensors,” Julia told the woman, realizing she finally had someone she could work with. “I have no idea how Montgomery will have survived, and I’m losing the beacon fast. I’ll feed your computers the code and frequency.”
“Right here,” the other woman told her, leading Julia to a computer console. “I’m Mirella Harrison, Section Chief of the Sherwood Security Service aboard Sherwood Orbital. If you’ve got a beacon for Montgomery, let’s find him.”
Voice of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 3) Page 11
