“This is the end of the line for us, Mage-Lieutenant,” the Augment Mage told her. “I have some idea of what is waiting for you on Styx, so I suspect you’ll find your welcome far warmer than you’re afraid of.”
“Like the welcome the Royal Guard got when you intercepted them?” Roslyn asked, her tone falsely sweet.
Ad Aaron smirked.
“My people check the catering staff supplies for trinary poisons,” he told her. “I hope the Protectorate continues to forget.”
With that wonderful tidbit, he stood aside and allowed her guards to pull her onto the shuttle. Roslyn dared to hope that would be the last she saw of the man. Not that she expected whoever replaced him to be any better.
Her guards carefully seated her on one of the shuttle seats, within eyesight of Alexander’s stretcher, and belted her in. The safety belts were woven through the chains of her manacles in such a way that both used the manacles to help make her safer and used the safety belts to keep her restrained.
In no way was it comfortable. Roslyn twitched against it, trying to find something slightly less painful, and was surprised by one of the Augments leaning over to check the straps.
“Where does it hurt?” he asked in a gentle tone. “We need you restrained; we’re not trying to torture you.”
She glared at him.
“Look, I can adjust the straps and manacles so you spend the flight in minimal discomfort, or I can leave you in pain,” he told her. “I’d rather do the former, but I need your help.”
“Fine.” She shook her head. “Top left is cutting into my shoulder. Mid-right is cutting into my hip.”
There wasn’t much point in trying to use the limited sympathy she was getting to try and create an escape opportunity, either. She could see eight Augments in the passenger compartment, mostly clustered around Alexander’s stretcher.
Her guard reached over and carefully adjusted the straps and manacles to relieve some of the pressure.
“Thanks,” she admitted grudgingly. He’d even managed to do it without accidentally groping her, which, given where the straps had been cutting, had taken real care.
“Settle in,” her other guard told them both. “Acceleration in sixty seconds.”
Roslyn hadn’t heard an announcement, but she guessed that everyone aboard the shuttle except her had a computer in their head.
“Should we be blacking out the display?” the sympathetic guard asked, gesturing to the screens that covered the passenger compartment’s walls. “She might know enough to ID the system.”
“And who is she going to tell?” the other guard asked drily. “Orders are specific, actually. They want her to see Styx.”
Roslyn wasn’t going to complain, even if the guard was right. So long as she was trapped in a Republic base, she had no ability to tell anyone what was going on.
But she was curious enough to want to see. Who knew? She might manage to escape again and find a Link—and she was about fifty percent certain she could manage to send a message to the Link at Legatus if she did that.
The shuttle broke free of its mothership with a gentle acceleration that was no danger to anyone. Even as the jump-capable clipper shrank behind them, Roslyn noted that the acceleration was kept low, barely half a gravity.
They could do a lot more to keep an unconscious woman safe in the sickbay of a starship than in a stretcher on a shuttle. Lower accelerations were better, and the low thrust gave Roslyn the chance to study the ship behind her, confirming her assumptions of its design and intent.
Her attention was quickly dragged away by their destination. It was hard not to notice a gas giant looming behind everything.
Without anything else to use for scale, it was hard to get a sense of how large the blue-white planet was. Roslyn’s trained eye picked out the number of visible rings—four—and large moons—six—in a few seconds, though.
That wasn’t necessarily enough to identify the gas giant, but she had a good mental catalog of the UnArcana Worlds, and there were only so many blue-white mid-sized gas giants in those fifteen systems.
Only two had four major rings and more than six large moons. If she was missing one moon, she was looking at Toliara in the New Madagascar System. If there were three behind the gas giant, she was looking at Hyacinth in Chrysanthemum.
She was pleased enough with managing to narrow it down that much that it took her at least thirty seconds to realize the problem: both of those systems were still officially part of the Protectorate.
It took her a few more seconds to digest that. Seconds in which she picked out the real reason for their presence in the system. She’d taken it for a natural part of the planet’s coloring at first, but as they approached, it became clearer what she was looking at.
The accelerator ring was thinner than the one in Legatus, missing much of the additional armoring and fortifications the Centurion Ring had to protect it. Where the Centurion project had included living quarters and operating space and was, generally, a massive space station built around a particle accelerator, this was purely a particle accelerator.
But it was, without a doubt, a full-sized accelerator ring. As Roslyn looked around for other signs of civilization, a hole began to grow in the bottom of her stomach.
She’d picked out the moons, but now she began to pick out the ships. They were too far away for her to identify class or even type, but there were dozens of large ships visible on the screens. A large and gangly-looking collection of structures was barely visible, just clear enough for her to guess it as a shipyard complex at least two-thirds of the size of the yards at Centurion.
A shipyard complex the Protectorate had never known existed. Attached to an accelerator ring they’d guessed had to exist but had never found—in a star system that the Protectorate had thought was loyal.
The Augments around were eerily silent, leaving Roslyn to her own thoughts as the shuttle dove toward the accelerator ring. One of the silver stars resolved itself into a space station, not a ship, and she grimaced.
If there’d been any question of the nature of the place she’d been brought, the station would have answered the question. Roslyn Chambers was the Flag Lieutenant of the woman commanding the primary striking force of the Protectorate.
She was entirely familiar with the profile of the Republic’s standard heavy defensive fortress.
Gunships fell in around the shuttle as they closed with the fortress. Even the sublight parasite warships dwarfed the spacecraft, but someone was taking no chances there. Unsurprisingly, the shuttle didn’t decide to open fire on the space station and delivered Roslyn and her Admiral to the fortress without incident.
The portion of the station they docked on was rotating to create centripetal pseudogravity, allowing Roslyn to carefully stand under her own power as her guards unstrapped her.
Alexander’s stretcher went first, accompanied by the lion’s share of the guards. By the time Roslyn left the shuttle herself, more uniformed medtechs were swarming, transferring the Mage-Admiral to a more solid gurney and hooking the wires and tubes up to new machinery.
“This way,” a uniformed older man told Roslyn. “We’ll take her from here, gentlemen,” he told the two guards who’d accompanied her on the shuttle.
“Of course, sir,” the unnamed guards agreed instantly, leaving Roslyn wondering who the hell the new man was. She studied him carefully for a moment. He was definitely Augmented, but he wore a formal dress uniform. She didn’t recognize all of the medals, but she knew what the silver eagle on each of the man’s shoulder boards meant.
“I am Colonel Othmar McLain,” he introduced himself. “You don’t need to know my branch of service.”
It was more than rank that was sending her guards scurrying away, Roslyn suspected. There was another piece of insignia the graying Colonel wore that she didn’t recognize: a shepherd’s crook worked in gold.
A group of six soldiers in undress uniform appeared behind Colonel McLain as he gestured for them
to fall in around Roslyn.
“Welcome to Styx, Mage-Lieutenant Chambers,” he told her. “Walk with me.”
It wasn’t a question and she obeyed the order. The soldiers were augmented but not the same level as the Augments she’d been surrounded by for the last two weeks. They were, unless she missed her guess, Republic Space Assault Troopers—the equivalent of Martian Marines.
“I see that speed may be an issue,” McLain said as they left the shuttle bay. “If I have my men unchain your feet, Lieutenant Chambers, do you promise to be at least moderately cooperative?”
“I’m not sure I can take an entire fortress with just kicks,” she said drily. “You might be safe regardless of my intent.”
“I would still have your promise of cooperation, Lieutenant,” the Colonel told her. “The less difficulty we cause each other, the easier this whole process is going to be. While there is certainly no way you can freely wander the station or be without restrictions on your magic, there are accommodations we can reach with each other while you remain a prisoner of war.”
“And if I decide my duty is to escape?”
McLain smiled thinly.
“We will do our best to recapture you alive, but I can make no promises,” he warned her. “Styx and Hades are critical to the war effort. We can take no chances here.”
“I’m not going to try and kick your soldiers if you unchain my feet, Colonel,” Roslyn conceded. “For any other promises, we’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?”
“Good enough for now,” he said. “Osric, release the Mage-Lieutenant’s feet, please.”
30
The station was immense. Roslyn had known that intellectually—it was a clone of one of the primary fortresses that had guarded Centurion and would host five hundred gunships, after all—but it was an entirely different matter to walk its decks for twenty-five minutes before they reached their destination.
There were almost certainly faster methods of traveling around Styx, but Colonel McLain was making a point. The size of the station and her unfamiliarity with it left her with no chance of finding her way to any critical components even if she did escape.
She was reasonably sure she could find her way back to the shuttle bay—but she was also certain that her escorts had taken her a roundabout route to reach their destinations. She had a very good sense of direction, even on a space station.
“Through here,” McLain instructed as a door slid open at a silent command. Four of the assault troopers split off to stand around the door as Roslyn hesitated. “Please, Mage-Lieutenant.”
Roslyn had no ability to argue or resist. Swallowing a retort, she stepped through the door into her cell.
To her surprise, it was a decently appointed small apartment. There were chairs, a table, what looked like a separate bedroom. They were larger quarters than she’d had on Durendal—and the hundred-megaton dreadnought was hardly hurting for crew space.
The door closed behind them and she turned around. McLain had only brought two of the guards in with him, and he smiled wryly at her.
“We hope to convince you that the Republic is not your enemy, Lieutenant,” he confessed freely. “There is much the Protectorate hides from its people. For now, though, we still need to take precautions. In this space, however, we are able to be more flexible than elsewhere.
“Osric, please remove the Lieutenant’s cuffs.”
Roslyn stared at the Republican soldiers in shock as the assault trooper stepped up and removed the Mage-cuffs on her wrists and ankles. Not the chains but the cuffs themselves, the things barring her from her magic.
She reached for her power, not even sure if she would strike out…but it was still gone. Shock at their releasing her turned into shock at her magic’s absence.
“This apartment is warded against the use of magic,” McLain said calmly. “I am not certain it would work on, say, Mage-Admiral Alexander, but I am told there are very few Mages who would be able to reach their magic in here.”
“You’re testing me,” Roslyn observed.
“And the wards on the room,” he confirmed. “You wouldn’t make it far, powers or no, right now. But we needed to confirm that the wards function. From your expression, I take it they do?”
“How many Mages do you people have?” she snapped.
“Please, Lieutenant, I’m not going to answer that question,” he told her. “For now, I have performed my duty and seen you safely to your quarters. I ask that you go through everything and let us know if there is anything missing that you would need in terms of clothing or hygiene supplies.
“You are a prisoner of war, yes, but I hope to have a less hostile relationship than is traditional in these matters. We are all humans of the twenty-fifth century, after all, and we have grown beyond the errors of our past.”
“That seems to result in us finding new ones, doesn’t it?” Roslyn ground out.
“Perhaps,” he conceded gently. “But I will leave you your privacy for now. There are clothes in the closet that should be in the right size, but we had to improvise on short order. I can’t promise anything is perfect, but, again…let us know what is lacking.
“I will be back later to check in. If anything is critical, the intercom here will contact your guards.” He touched a panel. “We will speak again soon.”
The three Republicans left the apartment’s living room as a body, closing the door behind them. It almost certainly locked and sealed, trapping her in a room she could never escape without her magic.
The furniture looked comfortable enough, but Roslyn hesitated to even touch it. McLain wasn’t even bothering to hide his intent, and she hated the man for it. A little bit of comfort, even the hot shower she was going to take now she had the option, wasn’t going to convince her to change sides.
But while she was grimly determined to make sure the Republic failed, they’d marked her as someone they wanted to turn—and since they already had Mage-Admiral Alexander imprisoned alongside her, Roslyn Chambers really wasn’t sure why.
And that terrified her.
31
Somewhere in the mess of data that Damien Montgomery had access to was the answer to all of his problems. He was reasonably sure of that, especially since he knew the question that answer belonged to.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have that answer, which made his current meeting with the Protectorate High Command aggravating.
“The Gygax System represents a strategic target, but without any knowledge of where the Republic fleet has retreated to, we can’t risk splitting Second Fleet more than we already have,” Mage-Admiral Marangoz argued. “Re-concentrating the dreadnoughts at Legatus gives us a nodal force that can respond to Republican actions, but we have lost track of multiple carrier groups.”
“The possibility remains that all of those carrier groups have gone rogue,” Admiral Amanda Caliver noted. Like Marangoz, Caliver was present virtually. Unlike Marangoz, the first-among-equals of the Protectorate High Command was in Sol. She was linked in by radio from a battleship in orbit where Marangoz was speaking to them via the Link from Legatus.
“Much as I would like to think my little speech convinced over a third of the RIN to lay down their arms, I doubt it,” Damien said grimly. “The revelation of the true nature of the Prometheus Interface broke RIN morale at a key point and, yes, a number of ships surrendered or disappeared.
“Some of those ships are still out there. Some of those ships were almost certainly destroyed, but we can be regrettably confident that the majority of the RIN ships that didn’t surrender returned to the Republic fold.”
“In the absence of a checkmate target, I hesitate to commit Second Fleet against any target, sirs,” Marangoz told them.
“You forget one aspect, Admiral,” Kiera Alexander said softly, the Mage-Queen leaning forward. She was in the room with Damien, making them the only two people in the meeting physically sharing a space.
“If Gygax was only a shipyard or only a munitions supply s
ource, purely strategic and operational concerns might suggest leaving it be for now,” she noted. “But it is not merely those things. The primary concern in Gygax is the Project Prometheus facility—and the fact that there are still over a thousand Mages taken from occupied Protectorate worlds by the Republic that we have not located.”
The worlds were now back in Martian hands, but they had spent weeks—months, in some cases—under Republic control. No one had expected the Republic to be kidnapping and murdering Mages.
If they had, those worlds might never have fallen. Damien hesitated to underestimate the assembled power of the Mage families that dominated most Protectorate worlds.
“We cannot in good conscience allow a Prometheus facility to continue functioning,” Kiera told them all. “But most importantly of all is that the Gygax Prometheus facility is the most likely place for Our citizens to be held captive.”
The capital Our did not go unnoticed by anyone in the call. Kiera had a very sharp sense of when to use the royal We.
The conference was silent, then Marangoz cleared his throat.
“I see your point, Your Majesty,” he conceded. “Based off the intelligence we have, I believe a heavy task group based around a dreadnought and several battleships should suffice to secure the Gygax System for the Guard to move on the Prometheus facility and Greyhawk.”
“Make it happen, Admirals,” Damien ordered. He suspected that Jane Alexander wouldn’t have needed the reminder of what was at stake, but at least Marangoz hadn’t decided to dismiss his teenage Queen’s point.
Seven now-former flag and general officers of the Protectorate had made that mistake so far. Damien would tolerate disagreement, but too many of the senior military commanders only saw Kiera Alexander as a teenager without the background to understand their tasks.
The Service of Mars Page 17
