#
By the evening of the day after the attack, there didn’t seem to be any more value in a Hand of the Mage-King hanging around the area. His presence seemed to be reassuring the people of New Andes, but with the Marines present and beginning the hazardous-material cleanup, Damien wasn’t really required.
If he ever had been. Really, he’d arrived too late for his presence to make any difference, a situation that was now starting to feel all too familiar.
“Denis, get our shuttle prepped to fly,” he ordered Romanov. “We’ll return to the Mountain, see if combing through our growing pile of data can produce anything more useful.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Special Agent corralled the pilots and headed over to the spacecraft as Damien watched. He wasn’t sure he could do more at the Mountain, but all he could do here was stare at the crater created when he was too late.
“I assume there’s space on that ship for one more?” Samara asked, the MIS officer looking surprisingly pristine for not having had any more access to fresh clothes the last day than anyone else had.
“We’re not going to be swinging through Curiosity City,” Damien told her. “One of Major Calliope’s birds can get you home if you need.”
“I think you misunderstand me, Lord Montgomery,” she replied. “I’ve been assigned to this case until it’s done—which also means I’m assigned to you. Anywhere you’re going, I need to be around to liaise between you and the MIS teams assigned to this mess.
“Until we’re done, you’re not getting rid of me that easily.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had an MIS liaison before,” Damien admitted.
“You haven’t worked on Mars before,” she told him. “You’re right in the middle of our jurisdiction, calling on our resources to deal with a problem we should have found. If you don’t want me, my lord, we can arrange a different liaison—”
“The problem is not you, Inspector Samara,” he said quickly and carefully. “This case is…getting to me. A lot of people have died and I’m not left with many answers.
“There’s definitely space on the shuttle for one more,” he concluded. “I just don’t promise we’re going to have any more luck at Olympus Mons than here.”
“We keep digging, my lord,” she replied. “We’ve turned up a bunch of loose threads. Keep yanking and something will unravel.”
“I hope so,” he told her. “Come on. It doesn’t take that long for Marines to prep a shuttle for a suborbital flight.”
#
Chapter 11
They were halfway to Olympus Mons when the intercom buzzed.
“Lord Montgomery?” the pilot asked.
“What is it?” Damien replied.
“I have Dr. Christoffsen on the secure channel for you,” the man replied. “He says it’s urgent.”
Damien was sitting at the front of the main troop compartment, only a few steps from the officers’ compartment. “Urgent” from Christoffsen could be almost guaranteed to be “confidential”. On the other hand…
“I’ll be on in a moment,” he told the pilot. “Romanov, Samara, with me.”
His two subordinates fell in behind him as he moved forward, letting Romanov seal the privacy shield on the tiny room behind them as Damien plugged his security codes into the system.
“Professor,” he greeted his political aide as the balding older man appeared on the screen. “We’re on our way back to the Mountain. What do you need?”
“You may as well divert up,” Christoffsen told him. “The Council is requesting your presence again. How was your trip?”
Damien shook his head.
“My trip saw a lot of people dead because we weren’t fast enough,” he replied. “I’ve had better weeks. What does the Council want?”
“Officially, they’re asking for you to deliver an in-person update on their investigation into the Keepers,” Christoffsen replied. “Unofficially, Councilor Montague swung enough votes to give you a chance to run them through why everything happened.
“It’s the closest thing you’re going to get to a chance to present a defense, Damien,” he warned. “We have friends on the Council, but just the fact that Montague felt she needed to give you this opportunity is a bad sign.”
Damien sighed.
“I don’t suppose ‘I’m busy actually trying to do my damned job’ is a good enough reason to avoid this?”
“Not if you want to keep your ‘damned job,’” Christoffsen said bluntly. “I’m not sure how things got this bad, Damien. I don’t think it’s just the fact that the situation is unprecedented. Too many people see this as opportunity. A weakness.”
“And I just love being my King’s weakness,” Damien snarked. “All right, Professor. We’ll divert to Doctor Akintola. Will you meet us there?”
“I have Olympus Mons staff loading everyone’s travel kit onto a shuttle as we speak,” Christoffsen confirmed. “Any special requests?”
Damien glanced over at Samara, who was looking somewhat disconcerted at the frank nature of the discussion.
“MIS Inspector Munira Samara has been assigned to my staff,” he told Christoffsen. “Can you make sure there’s clothes on the shuttle for her? I don’t think she was expecting to get dragged into space.”
From her expression, however, she wasn’t planning on going anywhere else, and Damien would happily draft one more intelligent, competent agent to his service.
“If she can send me her sizes, I’m sure the Secret Service stockpile has some clothes that will fit,” the Professor promised. “If not, I probably have enough time to have something brought up from Olympus City before I launch.”
“Make sure there’s at least a couple of headscarves in there,” Damien told him, eyeing the light blue one Samara currently had wrapped over her hair. While there would be some in the Secret Service stockpile—just as there would be turbans and the strange underwear required by certain branches of Christianity—it wasn’t something that would be in the basic kit.
“I’ll be certain of it, my lord,” Christoffsen replied. “I’ll be aboard Akintola in about eighty minutes.”
“I’ll check with the pilot, but we’ll probably beat you there,” the Hand said. “Don’t worry; I am not going into this mess without you.”
#
Acceleration shifted them around as the assault shuttle turned for orbit, and Damien strapped into one of the seats in the officers’ compartment with a sigh that had only partially to do with the sudden increase in force.
“I…am not certain that was a conversation I should have overhead,” Inspector Samara finally said after a few minutes of silence. “It appears there are ramifications to this investigation I wasn’t aware of.”
“There are,” Damien agreed. “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a conversation you needed to be included in. As I understand it, Inspector, you’ve been assigned to my staff for at least the duration of this investigation?”
“In theory, I am working solely on this investigation, but both I and my superiors would regard it as a failure if I were not to assist you in anything else that came up,” she admitted.
“Exactly,” he said cheerfully. “Since I have you, Miss Samara, I intend to make full and complete use of you. To do so, I need you to be fully and completely informed about what’s going on—not least of which, the fact that it is appearing more and more likely that this may be my last investigation as a Hand.”
The MIS Inspector looked at him in confusion for several moments.
“That makes no sense, my lord.”
“In the context of the politics, it sadly does,” Damien told her. “It’s possible that if we manage to find out just what secret the Keepers are protecting that makes Mages and Marines and even Hands willing to betray, kill, and die for it…it’s possible that secret may buy me a stay of execution.”
He grimaced.
“It’s even possible that in the final accounting, I and the Mage-King will agree that the
particular secret needs to be kept, in which case my career becomes the next sacrifice on that altar,” he admitted. “I am far from having made my peace with that possibility, but I must admit it exists.”
“I see, my lord,” Samara said slowly.
“If I manage to keep my Hand, you may consider this case an audition,” he continued with a smile. “Having a trained detective and analyst attached to my staff could be useful. I prefer, as you can tell”—he gestured towards Romanov—“to keep my personal staff small and as fully in the loop as I can.
“But even if none of this was true,” he told her, the smile fading as he considered the screen showing their course to Doctor Akintola, “that would still have been a conversation you needed to listen in on.
“This investigation has a political minefield attached, and it would not be just to drag you into it without any kind of warning.”
“I appreciate that warning, my lord,” she told him. “And the warning that I’m apparently auditioning for a Hand’s staff—that wasn’t in my brief.”
“Working for a Hand is a volunteers-only deal,” Damien replied with a smile. “I won’t be drafting you.”
“I said I appreciated the warning, my lord,” she said with a smile of her own. “We’ll have to see if I succeed on my audition before I have to decide if I volunteer, won’t we?”
He chuckled.
“I see you’re going to fit in with my lunatics just fine.”
#
“This is Hand Montgomery aboard Doctor Akintola, requesting clearance to exit Mars orbit.”
The Civil Fleet controller chuckled.
“Aren’t we supposed to be assigning you a pilot, Lord Montgomery?” she asked.
“This is a luxury yacht,” he pointed out. “Even if I wasn’t qualified to fly her, she can basically fly herself.”
A moment of foresight when leaving the yacht after the first Council meeting meant that Damien had been able to shower and dress in a clean suit while the rest of his staff waited for Christoffsen to arrive with their travel kits.
There were few dangers in Mars orbit that worried Damien, and none of them involved anyone attempting to board Doctor Akintola under the guns of two of the Martian Squadron’s battleships. His entire security detail was currently in the showers, leaving him and the Professor the only people to oversee the yacht’s computers and get her on her way.
“You’re clear all the way to Ceres, my lord,” Control told him. “Olympus Mons filed your flight plan before you boarded. Your course is clear.”
“Any leftover War debris nearby?” Damien asked. The Eugenicist War had lasted a hundred years. Even though its battles had been relatively few and its ships tiny by modern standards, the War had littered the space between Earth and Mars—and a lot of orbits that originated between Earth and Mars—with high-speed debris.
Most of the actually hazardous ones had been cleaned up, but the ones that were left were radioactive enough to hide things. The last time he’d flown near one, someone had hidden a missile swarm in it.
“Not even a meteor until you’re in the Belt,” the woman replied. “Then you’re looking at slightly higher than normal density of debris. Charts should be updated, but watch your scanners. Normal precautions.”
“Understood. Thanks for the heads-up, Control. I’m bringing antimatter thrusters online in sixty seconds.”
“Have a safe flight.”
Damien let the channel drop as he plugged numbers into Akintola’s computers. Given the power of the yacht’s engines, they didn’t need to worry about orbital dynamics or anything similar. Their course was slightly more complicated than pointing the ship directly at Ceres and turning the engines on, but not by much.
“Anything I should be worrying about?” the Professor asked from the observer’s seat.
“From the flight?” Damien shook his head. “No. Just feeling paranoid today. This meeting, on the other hand, I feel like I should be worrying about. Anything you need to brief me on?”
#
Cold logic said that the trip out to Ceres was the best time Damien was going to have to catch up on his sleep, but the events of the prior few days and the upcoming Council session kept him awake when he tried.
Aboard Duke of Magnificence, he would usually pace the observation deck he’d taken for an office. Doctor Akintola was too small to have such a deck, despite its supply of every other luxury he could think of and many he wouldn’t have.
The next best thing was the yacht’s bridge, which doubled as her simulacrum chamber. All of the walls of the space at the center of the ship were covered in screens, allowing the Mage in the powered chair at the heart of the room to see everything.
Resting just above that powered chair was the semi-liquid silver form of the simulacrum that allowed a Mage to jump Akintola. Unlike the simulacrum aboard Duke, though, this one would only allow jumps. A Mage could use it to target spells outside the ship, but targeting was all it could do.
An unlimited amplifier, like the one a warship carried, would amplify any spell. They were terrifyingly powerful weapons, which made the ability of a Rune Wright like Damien to remove the limits on a civilian jump ship dangerous.
Fortunately, there were only four adult and one minor Rune Wrights in the Protectorate—and all of them except Damien were members of the Royal Family.
“Should I just assume, in future, that if I’m looking for you, I should go to the nearest place one can see stars?” Romanov asked, the Special Agent walking across the bridge and dropping into an observer chair. “Amiri said that was part of your attachment to the observation deck.”
“Helps me think,” Damien agreed. “And helps remind me of the scale of our affair sometimes.” He gestured at the screens. “How many stars can you see from here, Mage-Captain?”
They were over halfway to the asteroid belt, far away from any planets or other obstructions. In every direction, the darkness of space glittered with the pinpricks of distant suns.
“They’re not easily counted,” Romanov replied. “Hundreds? Thousands?”
“At least. Less than a hundred and twenty have human-occupied worlds,” Damien said. “Maybe half again that have outposts of some kind. The entire sphere of human space is perhaps four hundred light years across. We think we are so important, and yet we are so tiny.”
“Do I sense a metaphor, my lord?” the Marine asked dryly.
Damien laughed.
“I wasn’t intending one, but the point is there,” he agreed. “If it came down to it, Romanov, between resigning or letting the Mage-King suffer a constitutional crisis, what would you do?”
“My job is unlikely to trigger a constitutional crisis,” Romanov told him. “But…I’d be damned tempted to stick it out. I’d like to think I’d resign in the end, though,” he admitted.
“Yeah,” Damien said. “That’s about where I’m at. You may end up back with the Marines sooner than either of us expected.”
“It’s bullshit, sir.”
“No one said the joke would be funny, Mage-Captain,” Damien replied. “Only that if we couldn’t take it, we shouldn’t have signed up.”
“Fair enough, sir.”
His bodyguard fell back into silence and the Hand returned to his study of the stars. A flashing light on his console caught his attention, and he tapped commands on the arm of the powered chair, bringing the screen in closer and rotating the chair to face the icon the system was identifying.
“And now I wish they’d used a Navy computer for this ship,” he murmured as he worked through the unfamiliar iconography. “There we go… A distress signal?”
“In Sol, sir?”
Damien answered Romanov by playing the transmission.
A computerized voice echoed in Doctor Akintola’s bridge.
“This is an automated distress signal. Captain Gambon of the asteroid refinery Callisto has triggered a Class One distress beacon. This indicates active threat to life and health of Callisto’s crew. Me
ssage repeats. This is an automated distress signal. Captain Gambon of the asteroid refinery Callisto has triggered a class one distress beacon. This indicates…”
“There!” Damien said aloud as he isolated the source. “Callisto is about ten million kilometers away around the interior of the Belt. Akintola’s sensors can’t pick out the problem, but it’s not like we have missiles.”
A Navy warship could have picked out an attacker and launched missiles at them from there. Doctor Akintola, on the other hand, was completely unarmed and so lacked the long-range targeting sensors the warship would have had.
“Detouring.”
Damien started plugging the course in immediately, almost absently hitting a command to forward the distress signal back to Mars.
“As the Agent responsible for your safety, I should point out that isn’t our job,” Romanov said hesitantly.
“There’s nobody else closer than Ceres,” Damien pointed out. “Our vector’s already close enough, we can be there in under an hour, though we won’t be anything close to zero velocity. No one else can be there in less than six. If there’s a clear and present danger…”
“I’m with you, sir,” the Marine agreed instantly. “Just felt the job description meant I had to say something.”
“Go get your people in armor,” the Hand ordered. “I do not like the look of this.”
#
Chapter 12
Doctor Akintola was an incredibly maneuverable little ship, to a degree that was almost a shame, given that her usual use was flying dignitaries from point A to point B. Her magical gravity was rated to compensate for up to ten gravities of acceleration, and her engines were capable of pulling fifteen.
Damien danced the fleet little ship around one of the asteroid belt’s scattered dust clouds, his hands on the controls as he concentrated on the space around him.
He was vaguely aware that Samara had replaced Romanov in the bridge, the MIS Inspector silently taking a seat at the sensor console to help keep an eye on things, but his focus remained on getting Akintola to the ship blazing its call for help as quickly and safely as possible.
Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5) Page 8
