Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  “My lord,” Romanov greeted Damien, then fell silent. Something in Damien’s expression told him something was wrong.

  “Not my lord anymore,” Damien told him. “I have resigned my Hand. Just…Damien now, I think.”

  Both men fell in beside him as he continued out in the hallway, waiting in silence for him to get his thoughts in order.

  “What happens now?” Christoffsen finally asked as they reached the transit system, a network of trams and elevators that linked the entire immense complex inside Olympus Mons together.

  “I have a Royal Warrant,” Damien told them. “Denis, you and Munira remain under my command for the moment. I’m charged to complete my investigations into the Keepers, this ‘Kay’, and the Belt Liberation Front.”

  He shook his head.

  “And that’s…it,” he concluded. “I don’t know what happens after that yet. Robert…your task is complete, I think. I am…beyond grateful for all you have done for me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Christoffsen told him. “That’s it, then?”

  “His Majesty’s sources confirmed it,” Damien replied. “They were going to ask for my resignation. His Majesty would have refused, so I pre-empted them.”

  “It’s not right,” Romanov objected.

  “No. It’s politics,” Damien agreed. “But…sometimes the best service one can provide is to get out of the way. I’d expected to need your services for longer than this when we pulled you from the Marines. I apologize.”

  “This is not your fault,” the Marine said. “I just can’t believe it’s got this bad.”

  “His Majesty thinks…that this was set in motion by the Charter itself,” Damien admitted. “It’s been coming since the beginning. I’ve only bought time, but it’s time I think the Protectorate needs. Time to carry out the Inquest on Legatus, if nothing else.

  “I need you until this mess is over,” he continued. “We need to go catch up with Samara, see where we’re at on tracking the BLF.”

  He’d be fine so long as he kept working. He’d keep running until he ran out of road.

  Damien wasn’t quite sure what would happen then.

  “What about me?” Christoffsen asked, the political aide looking almost lost.

  “I don’t know, Robert,” Damien admitted with a sigh. “I don’t know where I’m going to be in a month. I’m sure His Majesty will have work for you, or you could even retire.” He forced a smile. “We all know you’ve earned a quiet retirement ten times over.”

  “If I wanted a quiet retirement, Damien, I’d have one,” the ex-Governor pointed out. He offered the younger man his hand. “Good luck.”

  “The same to you,” he replied, shaking Christoffsen’s hand. “I don’t think this mess is over yet, Robert. It’s just…no longer my mess.”

  #

  Returning to the rooms that they’d been using as a command center for the investigation, Damien couldn’t help falling into a leaden, fatalistic walk. The decision to resign might have been his, but that didn’t mean he liked it.

  He couldn’t be sure if it was his step, his face, or the lack of the hand that caused Munira Samara to realize there was a problem, but the woman rose almost instantly as he entered.

  “My lord?” she said questioningly, and he shook his head.

  “Not my lord anymore,” he echoed his earlier comment to Romanov. “Just…Damien. I’ve resigned my Hand, Munira. It appears you may have fallen into one of the shortest ‘permanent’ appointments to a Hand’s staff ever.”

  He shook his head slowly.

  “It’s a mess and I apologize for dragging you into it,” he told her.

  “Politics,” she replied. “They always mess everything up. What happens now…especially with this?” She gestured at the screen she’d been working on, which was currently showing the network of communication satellites in orbit around Mars.

  “His Majesty and I agreed I would see this mission through to the end,” Damien explained. “I hold his Voice and Warrant for the next few weeks, until we get this mess resolved. I want this bastard.”

  He sighed and pointed at the screen.

  “How are we doing on a vector?” he asked.

  “I’ve got Daniels and Cook on it,” she replied. “They’re the best I’ve ever worked with; I’m expecting some kind of answer soon.

  “What do we do once we have the location?”

  “The same thing we would have done before,” Damien replied. “Romanov and I load up our people onto Akintola and head out to investigate as quietly as possible. I no longer have true imperium, so we can’t coopt the Navy for it, but with Romanov’s people, I still have a full Marine company to call on.”

  He smiled grimly.

  “I may no longer bear a Hand, but I am no weaker for it,” he pointed out. “Between my own power and Romanov’s company, I’m confident in our ability to neutralize the Front and convince them to answer my questions.”

  “And if this ‘Kay’ is there?” Samara asked.

  “I’m confident in my ability to neutralize him and convince him to answer my questions,” Damien echoed. “He’s been clever and he’s been careful, but he’s not in my weight class and he knows it.”

  “I’ll make sure we have an interrogation team ready to go as well,” the MIS Inspector told him. “If you can get us prisoners, we can make sure you get answers.”

  “Let’s do it right,” Damien agreed. “If I only have one last mission for the Mountain, let’s make it worth it.”

  #

  Damien put the final pieces together in the package he was assembling, then stopped and stared at the computer screen. It was horrifying to see it all listed out like this, the neat little notes—at least one from each of the Hands who’d served in the last five years—on atrocity, murder and revolution.

  They’d had enough circumstantial evidence to be certain of who was behind the sudden increase in piracy and weapons smuggling for over a year, but while the Charter gave the Protectorate the authority to intern an entire planetary government and investigate their actions, it had never been done to a Core World.

  To launch an Inquest of this scale, to take Hands and ships and troops into the home system of the UnArcana movement, was to risk civil war. They’d needed ironclad proof, evidence they could lay in front of the Council that would be utterly damning.

  Major Kody and his men were the final link, the incontrovertible proof of a Legatus Military Intelligence Directorate operation on Mars itself. A squad of assassins and spies that had unleashed a terror campaign against the people of the Protectorate on the orders of the Legatan government.

  That link tied dozens of potential operations back to Legatus. Pirate campaigns. Armed rebellions. Terrorist movements. The complete devastation of not just one or two but a total of six secondary outposts.

  Over a million dead.

  Damien was grimly certain that some of the conflicts and atrocities wouldn’t tie back to Legatus in the end. Humanity had enough scum that at least some of the mess would have grown up on its own.

  Whoever was sent to Legatus would have to draw that line, between what could truly be blamed on Legatus and what would have been left uncertain. It wouldn’t be Damien now, but he knew the men and women who could replace him there.

  He didn’t necessarily trust them entirely anymore—having two of his former fellows attempt to kill him had eroded the unquestioning trust he’d once had for the Hands—but he knew their skills.

  The Inquest would be launched now and the Protectorate would have their answers. The dead would have their justice.

  Maybe once they had it, the memory of the shattered ruins of the outposts he’d failed to save would haunt his dreams a little less.

  #

  “My lord!”

  Damien jerked awake, only realizing he’d fallen asleep at his desk when Samara’s voice echoed into the office.

  “My lord, are you all right?” she asked.

  “Just Damien now, remembe
r?” he told her, forcing himself upright. Checking the system, he confirmed that he had at least managed to send the package supporting the Inquest to the Mage-King before he’d passed out.

  Shaking his head, he turned his gaze on the MIS Inspector. She’d changed at some point since he’d come in there, switching to a navy-blue suit with a plain white headscarf. Her gaze under the scarf was concerned, though she looked tired herself.

  “It’s habit already, I suppose,” she told him. “Are you all right?” she repeated.

  “Just tired,” he said. “Nightmares. ‘Perk’ of the job.” He sighed. “My old job, I guess.”

  “Don’t go giving up the mantle just yet, Montgomery,” she said sharply. “We still need you on top form if we’re going to wrap up this mess with the Keepers and Kay and the Front.”

  With an only-half-forced chuckle, he threw her a salute.

  “Yes, ma’am. What have you got for me?”

  “We just finished analyzing the vector we got from the comms satellites,” Samara told him. “May I?”

  She gestured at the display screen. Glancing at it again, Damien wiped the Inquest file from his screen, then unlinked his own PC and allowed her to access the screen.

  “To no one’s surprise,” Samara noted, “the channel was being relayed from the Belt. We think the origin was relatively close, too. We were losing basically all of the time delay in the distortion on the copy we had, but the satellites’ records show the inbound was from about five light-minutes away.”

  “What’s there?” Damien asked.

  “Officially?” Samara zoomed in on a section of the asteroid belt on the screen to show to him. “Fuck and all. No ships, no stations; there shouldn’t have been anything there during the conversation. So, unless the transmitter was somehow faster than light, which is impossible, or confusing the station…”

  “Something is there that’s not supposed to be,” he concluded, studying the screen. “No chance of it being further out?”

  “There isn’t anything further out along that line until the Kuiper belt,” she pointed out. “And while we were losing time delay, we weren’t losing days’ worth of time delay.”

  “How close have you narrowed down the locus?” he asked.

  “This area.” Samara waved at the screen. “We’re talking a cylindrical region of space about a million kilometers long by three hundred thousand kilometers wide. It’s not small.”

  “But by deep-space standards, it’s nothing,” Damien agreed. “Six significant asteroids?”

  “Exactly. My guess? The Front is using one of them as a source of water for fuel and oxygen for their little fleet.”

  Damien studied the rocks in the arc of space she’d picked out. Everything in the analysis made sense to him, which meant one of those chunks of space debris was almost certainly their target.

  “Ready to take another flight, Inspector Samara?”

  “I think we can make that happen,” she agreed.

  #

  Chapter 30

  Doctor Akintola’s boat bay was already packed full as Damien’s pilot neatly squeezed his assault shuttle into the last remaining space. Four Royal Martian Marine Corps assault shuttles already occupied the docking cradles inside the yacht, and the now five deadly small craft crowded a space designed for orbital runabouts and pleasure craft.

  The Marine pilots had still managed to leave a clear path to the exit from the boat bay, and at some point between the shuttle touching down and the air and metal outside cooling enough for Damien to exit the spacecraft, the path filled up.

  The ex-Hand stepped off the ramp onto Akintola’s deck to find himself facing a double file of Martian Marines in dress uniform, stretching from the safety radius around his shuttle to the exit from the bay.

  Romanov had been right behind him and had clearly expected this, as neither the Marine nor any of the other occupants of the shuttle ran into Damien’s back as he froze, staring at the entire company of men and women drawn up in formation in front of him.

  “Company, salute!” a trained parade ground voice bellowed, and the Marines’ hands snapped up into perfect salutes.

  After two years as a Hand, Damien’s response was instinctive as he returned the salute, holding it for a long moment as he struggled to retain some degree of self-control.

  “Come on, sir,” Romanov whispered from behind him. “We’re holding up the line.”

  The spell somehow broken, Damien dropped his salute and walked forward, passing through the neat rows of saluting Marines as they paid their respects.

  “You should have warned me,” he whispered back to Romanov.

  “My Sergeants barely warned me,” the Mage-Captain replied. “Not sure if it was their idea or the grunts’, to be honest, but I wasn’t going to stop them. You needed the reminder, if nothing else.”

  Damien returned another group of salutes, then came to a halt in front of the boat bay doors, where the senior noncoms and junior officers of Romanov’s old company, still assigned to his personal escort until his Warrant expired, waited for him.

  “Lord Montgomery,” the senior Sergeant, a wiry older man Damien had only met a few times, greeted him.

  “Not a Lord anymore,” he told them. “Just…Montgomery. Thank you.”

  “Titles change,” the noncom replied. “Voices and Hands and Princes and Kings, all just names in the end. The Marine Corps know their own, my lord. We repay loyalty with loyalty, duty with duty, honor with honor.

  “And no matter what may come to pass, Damien Montgomery, know this: the Royal Martian Marines do not forget.”

  #

  Damien settled into the command chair at the heart of the luxury jump-yacht, feeling surprisingly more calm. He wasn’t sure if the Marines knew how much their gesture had meant to him, but it had definitely helped settle his own mood, at least for now.

  “What’s the plan?” Samara asked as she dropped into one of the observer chairs, studying the screens over his shoulder.

  “Find the bad guys, shoot the bad guys, question the survivors, be home for dinner?” Romanov suggested as the Marine turned Secret Service bodyguard took the other chair.

  “I don’t know about dinner, but that’s not a bad summary,” Damien replied. He brought up a projection of the Sol system around them.

  “Our potential target zone is here.” He highlighted the arc of space the channel could have originated from. The midpoint was just over six light-minutes from them. “If we set our course directly for them and burn fifteen gees the whole way, we’ll come to a full stop in the middle of that zone in just over fifteen hours—but it won’t be very comfortable and they’ll see us coming the whole way.

  “I don’t want to give these pricks that much warning,” he concluded.

  “Fortunately, right now, one of the trailing Jupiter Trojan clusters is on a near-direct line past them,” he noted. “The course to get there would still leave us a few million kilometers off, but being on that course—and publicly filing it, of course—will have us heading in the same direction.”

  A course lit up on the projection in orange.

  “That has us accelerate for seven and a half hours, coast for a day, then decelerate to rendezvous with the Trojan cluster.”

  Damien tapped the projection. “We’ll follow this course until we’re about twenty-four million kilometers from the target zone, at which point we’ll bring the drive up at fifteen gravities and do a hard deceleration to drop us right into the middle of the zone.

  “They’ll have about four hours’ warning, and we’ll be close enough to see where they try and run,” he concluded. “I’ll want your people in the shuttles at that point, Romanov,” he warned. “We may have to try to chase some runners down, make sure they don’t get away.”

  “We can do that,” the Marine confirmed. “We’ll get these bastards.”

  “I need them alive,” Damien told him. “As many of them as possible. Neutralizing the Belt Liberation Front as a threat
is a bonus. I need to know about this bastard they were working with.”

  He wasn’t expecting Kay to be hiding among the Front, though it was possible. He was hoping that that they’d be able to tell him more about the mysterious Mage who appeared to have been hunting down the last of the Keepers…and working for Legatus.

  #

  Even interplanetary flights were long, long endeavors. After the first few hours, Damien found himself calculating whether or not he would save time by jumping Akintola part of the way.

  He knew the answer before he even tried to calculate. The minimum distance he could jump a starship was about a light-hour. Visiting Jupiter, with Mars as far away as it currently was, could justify it. But the asteroid cluster he was theoretically heading to was less than twenty light-minutes away. His true destination was even closer.

  It was an easier exercise than planning for the future. One way or another, the investigation into the Keepers was just about over—either he’d find answers with the BLF…or he wouldn’t, and he’d have run out of leads.

  Once it was over, he’d return the temporary Warrant he’d been given and then…something.

  It had seemed so clear when he’d threatened to retire to prevent the Mage-King trying to keep this mess secret. Then he’d told Alexander he’d go back to Sherwood, take a position with his homeworld’s government or perhaps its rapidly growing defensive militia.

  He could still do that, he supposed. Stay “on call” to act as the King’s Voice if he needed a Rune Wright’s touch for at least some time.

  Doing that to defy his King would have been a victory of sorts. His choice. Doing it now felt like admitting defeat, crawling home with his tail between his legs.

  That his old girlfriend and her father the Governor would be glad to see him didn’t change that.

  He supposed he could even buy a ship. Hands were well compensated for their work, and Damien had spent very little of it. His name alone would open options for financing that would be closed to most.