The Service of Mars Read online

  “I do believe we made the Administrator cry, Captain,” Milhouse told her, probably watching the same video feed. “I don’t think we need to worry about an ambush.”

  “I just hope she feels as charitable toward us once she realizes we’re on the opposite sides of a war,” Kelly replied.

  “Most likely she was downplaying the outbreak, boss,” Shvets said. “Which means those supplies may well mean the difference between life and death for hundreds if not thousands of people she’s responsible for.”

  The navigator shook their head.

  “I am a cynic by nature, but even I think she’s probably going to feel pretty warm and fuzzy about us and the Protectorate after this.”

  25

  Roslyn paced. Five steps. Turn left. Four steps. Turn left. Five steps. Turn left. Four steps.

  The cell the Republican agents had put her in had probably started life as a broom closet or something similar. Five steps by seven, but almost half of the width was taken up by the bed that was the only furniture.

  They’d unhooked the Mage-cuffs so she could move, but all four of the manacles themselves were still locked against her skin. She could feel her magic, but she couldn’t reach it. Couldn’t command the Gift that was as much a part of her as her legs or her chest.

  Five steps. Four steps. Five steps. Four steps. Repeat.

  Roslyn had a good sense of time and she’d been awake for two days. Her captors brought her food twice a day and took her to use a bathroom four times a day. All she could really be sure of was that she was on board a jump-ship of some kind.

  They were jumping three times a day, which told her that there was only one Mage aboard qualified to jump. She could have doubled the speed of the ship if she’d been helping, but she hadn’t been asked and wasn’t going to offer.

  No one would believe her if she did.

  The door slid open without warning and she stopped in her pacing, turning to watch the man who entered with a gaze she knew was more desperate than anything else.

  She didn’t recognize him. Her understanding was that most of the people aboard the ship had been pretending to be Royal Guards, but other than von Sulzbach—ad Aaron—none of them were Mages, so they’d kept their armor on.

  Apparently without the Guard armor, they thought Alexander would have been able to identify them as non-Mages. In Roslyn’s moments of long-term thought, that was fascinating and fit the pattern she was recognizing around both Alexander and Montgomery’s power.

  “You’re not carrying a tray and I don’t need to piss,” she said bluntly. “What do you want?”

  The man chuckled.

  “You don’t get to ask us those questions, girl,” he told her. He held up a length of chain that would link into the manacles on Roslyn’s wrists. “You’re coming with me. If you cooperate, it’ll all be smooth and might even be fun.”

  Roslyn felt her body tense. She was intellectually certain that no one on this ship was going to try and assault her, though the implicit threat was a powerful tool in their arsenal. Her once-victimized emotions, though, had no such certainty.

  The Legatan had left the door open behind him, too. She let that fear fill her limbs and turn into anger, the same anger that had left her planetary governor’s son smashed into a wall and had fueled an adolescent crime spree after all of the charges both ways from that incident had been dropped.

  Magic was her strength, her power, her Gift—but the Royal Martian Navy also expected a certain degree of physical fitness from their officers. They didn’t care about weight—probably a good thing for a woman built like Roslyn—but she had to be able to lift a certain amount and run a given distance in a specific time.

  And every recruit in the RMN, officer and enlisted alike, was given a solid foundation in unarmed self-defense.

  Roslyn was inside the guard’s reach before he recognized she was moving. A closed fist hammered into the man’s throat while her elbow blocked his attempt to grab her. He stumbled backward, gasping for breath, and she slammed her foot into his right kneecap.

  From the complaint her bare foot sent back, the man was an Augment and had armor plating built into his kneecap—but it wasn’t enough for one of the most vulnerable parts of the human body. His kneecap dislocated with an audible pop and Roslyn hammered her elbow into his stomach.

  The Republican folded like tissue paper. He hit the metal floor hard and was still.

  Roslyn stared down at him for a long second, unsure whether he was breathing—and then decided she didn’t care as she knelt and started trying to find the keys to her cuffs. So long as she was manacled, she was vulnerable.

  The only things of use the guard had on him were a stun baton and the chain for linking her manacles. No keys, no release cards. Probably even the manacles were linked to a control code the Augment had held in his implants.

  Swallowing a curse, Roslyn turned on the stun baton and stepped out into the corridor. If nothing else, she was one of only two conscious people on the ship who could jump it. If she could get to the workshop that was always attached to the simulacrum chamber, the tools there should let her remove the cuffs.

  And once she had her magic back and access to the simulacrum, the ship was hers.

  It didn’t take Roslyn long to find a console and try to pull up a map. Not knowing what kind of ship she was on would doom her escape attempt before it even began. In her experience, ships relied on their crews’ wrist-comps for most tasks—and this crew appeared to have equivalent hardware in their heads as backup.

  Still, the information stations existed, and she tracked one down in the maintenance control hub. Her cell really had been a broom closet, one of a set of storage rooms attached to the maintenance center.

  The systems were locked down, asking for passwords and identifiers she didn’t have, and she cursed as it flashed up an alert from her prodding. She’d known people who would have been able to hack their way into the console, but she wasn’t one of them.

  Hack into and hotwire an aircar? She could do that. A starship console? Not a chance.

  And she’d set off an alarm.

  Roslyn picked a random direction, hoping it was toward something of use, and set off at a jog. She only made it through a few corridors before she ran into her first problem, a crewwoman in unmarked fatigues working on an exposed panel.

  She didn’t wait for the woman to say anything. As the technician began to stand, Roslyn slammed a knee into her back, pushing her to the ground and pressing the stun baton to her spine.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” she hissed, “but I will. Simulacrum chamber. Where is it?”

  “You’re an idiot,” the woman replied. “You’re in deep space with—”

  Roslyn triggered the stun baton and felt her captive spasm in pain. She felt more than a bit guilty, but she needed an answer.

  “Fine, it won’t help you,” the Legatan growled. “Stern is back the way you came. So, thirty meters toward the stern and two decks up.”

  “Thanks,” Roslyn hissed. She twisted the stun baton to “intelligent disable” and zapped the woman again.

  Feeling guilty as all hell, she left the unconscious technician behind and charged back the way she came, looking for stairs up. The corridor signage was the same as it would have been on any RMN ship, and she found a maintenance shaft just past where she’d started.

  That was when she realized she was walking in roughly one gravity and the ship definitely didn’t have gravity runes. She tentatively hopped as she opened the shaft, assessing the sideways force, and grimaced.

  They were under one gravity of acceleration. So, the ship wasn’t big enough for centrifugal gravity and was designed for continual-thrust pseudogravity. That was normal enough—except that it told her that “stern” definitely wasn’t in the direction the technician had told her.

  The stern of the ship was beneath her, where the engines were burning to provide a semblance of acceleration. If the tech had been fooling with her
, then…

  This was a mess. Roslyn figured the tech had been minimizing the lies, which meant the simulacrum chamber was sternward from her. Which meant she was going down.

  Swallowing against her fear, she stepped onto the ladder and began to climb toward the engines. One deck. Two.

  Two decks was what the tech had said. Roslyn hesitated, then opened the hatch. There was nothing in the corridor to tell her if she was close to the simulacrum chamber—it would be one of the few spaces that were unlabeled.

  She took a guess and headed in the opposite direction from where she’d found the tech, hoping against hope that she’d find the simulacrum chamber before anyone else found her.

  Instead, she found ad Aaron. The man stepped out of a door she was about to pass and gestured toward her, freezing her limbs in place with bonds of pure force.

  “The advantage of implants,” he noted quietly, “is that we don’t need klaxons and lights to alert everyone of an escaped prisoner. I figured you’d head for the simulacrum chamber, but you wouldn’t have made it much farther in any direction.”

  Roslyn snarled at him. There wasn’t anything else she could do as he lifted her off the ground, the cuffs denying her her own magic.

  “I understand that the duty of a prisoner is to escape, but I do not have time for this bullshit,” ad Aaron told her. “One of my men is now in the infirmary. I’m not overly impressed with an Augment who managed to get taken down by a seventy-kilo kid because he wasn’t being careful, but he’s still one of mine.”

  Ad Aaron was now very much in Roslyn’s personal space, holding her at his eye level as he glared. Despite the very clear and present physical and magical threat the Mage presented, Roslyn realized that she was at least not expecting him to molest her.

  She couldn’t say the same about the man she’d put in the infirmary.

  “Your man was trying to rape me,” she said flatly. “I’m just supposed to take that, am I?”

  The corridor was very, very quiet.

  “You were not supposed to be taken from that section of the ship until we arrived,” ad Aaron told her coldly. “I will examine the surveillance. If you’re telling the truth, that will not happen again. I promise you that.

  “I also promise you that if you escape again, you will join your Admiral in an induced coma for the next goddamn week; am I clear?”

  “Why don’t you just kill me? Stick my brain in a fucking machine and be done with it,” Roslyn snapped. She was a lot less valuable than Alexander and she was sick to her stomach.

  “You’re on a list,” ad Aaron told her. “I also don’t like to kill anyone I don’t have to, but people high up have flagged you as a high-value target.

  “So, I repeat myself. I can make your life damn uncomfortable if you don’t cooperate, so I suggest you do cooperate. Am. I. Clear?”

  Roslyn forced a nod.

  At least she’d learned something interesting, too. If they were traveling for another week, then they were a minimum of thirty light-years from Nueva Bolivia. Even that little information would have been useful to the fleet.

  Assuming, of course, that Roslyn Chambers had any way to get that information to them.

  26

  It was quiet in Kelly’s office as she ran through the numbers again. It was a pretty simple equation, really. An accelerator ring required x person-years of work to construct. The LV-71-DA extraction facility represented a large-scale out-system construction endeavor by two UnArcana Worlds and had y people.

  An accelerator ring built by a similar operation would take at least z years to build.

  The number that fell out was…large. Even if she assumed a larger project than LV-71-DA by a factor of ten, she was still estimating decades of construction time. Even that was ignoring the fact that to build an accelerator ring outside of one of their systems, the Republic would have had to build an entirely new mining infrastructure in that system and provide laborers for that as well.

  To have built a second accelerator ring in the time since the Centurion ring had been completed, someone would have needed to relocate millions of workers. Highly skilled engineers and deep-space workers, too, not the kind of people that could be bought from the never-sufficiently-damned human trafficking rings.

  “Someone would have noticed,” she said aloud.

  “Noticed what?” a soft voice asked from the door. “That you’re still up and awake three hours after you should be asleep?”

  Kelly looked up and saw Xi Wu standing in her doorway, the Chinese Mage smiling at her.

  “I mean, my desire to have you come to bed is at least a little selfish,” Xi said, “but you should rest.”

  “I keep looking at the numbers and the data and I keep coming to the same answers,” Kelly admitted. “It’s not smart, I suppose, but I need an answer, Xi.”

  Xi crossed the room and kissed Kelly’s forehead.

  “And what answer are you seeing, my love?” she asked.

  “We’re scouting empty systems and it’s a waste of our time,” Kelly said aloud. “The Centurion ring took a hundred thousand workers forty years. To build an accelerator ring in secret in less than half a century…”

  She shook her head.

  “If we assume the project started twenty years ago, I’m still looking at them needing to hide a station with a million people,” she concluded. “And we’d have noticed a million deep-space workers going missing.”

  Xi reached over and turned off the wallscreen. As Kelly looked up at her in mild objection, her wife dropped into her lap and kissed her very thoroughly.

  “So,” Xi said when they came back up for breath. “Train of thought broken. What are you finding in the pieces, Kelly?”

  “Give me a moment,” Kelly said, thoroughly distracted. She ran her fingers through Xi’s lustrously long black hair and smiled softly as her wife leaned into her. “Pieces of my train of thought, huh?”

  “You’re going in circles. I’m trying to break them,” the Mage replied. “That I also get to make out with you to achieve said breaking is a nice benefit.”

  Kelly laughed and kissed her wife again.

  Leaning back in her chair with Xi resting against her, the pieces clicked together.

  “They needed somewhere with an infrastructure they could expand and a population they could draft,” Kelly murmured. “It has to be in an inhabited system. It didn’t need to be one with the infrastructure and training, though, depending on how hard they were going to push.”

  “We checked everywhere,” Xi pointed out. “So, if it can’t be in an uninhabited system—and I agree with you—and it’s not in the Republic, where did they hide it?”

  “Six years ago, my ship got dragged into a move by Legatus to reinforce Chrysanthemum’s security in exchange for concessions that nobody explained to the crew carrying the gunships,” Kelly told her. “I spoke to Niska about it recently, and he didn’t seem overly sure about what was in the system now.”

  “But Chrysanthemum is still ours, aren’t they?” Xi asked.

  “They never seceded,” Kelly agreed. “But if I was going to hide my continuity facility, my secret shipyard and my backup antimatter supply, I’d put it where no one was going to look.

  “Where better but the territory of the people I expect to fight? Of course their fallback system never seceded. We should have paid more damn attention.”

  “Think you can sell MISS on that?” her wife asked. “Because I’ll jump where you ask me to jump, love. Half the senior officers are your spouses, and I think the rest of the crew will follow too.

  “If you want us to disobey orders and go to Chrysanthemum…”

  “No.” Kelly was tempted, but she wasn’t going to ruin the careers of a hundred other souls for this. If it was the only way, maybe, but it wasn’t.

  “No,” she repeated. “We’re only two jumps from Legatus, Xi. Why turn around when we can complete our official mission…and then I can go over Peyton’s head via the Link.”
>
  Xi tightened her grip on Kelly.

  “The Link is only connected to Mars right now,” she murmured. “How far over the director’s head are you going?”

  “All the way up,” Kelly told her wife. “I didn’t get the impression the order to leave the unseceded UnArcana Worlds alone came from Peyton. And since I don’t know how high that order came from, I’m going to call my ex-boyfriend.”

  There was one more piece she needed before she could run the problem all the way up the chain, and it fell into place shortly after they returned to Legatus.

  “Captain LaMonte, we’ve received your data upload,” Director Peyton told her. “I’m seeing a critical flag. Did you find the accelerator ring?”

  “Negative, Director,” Kelly told her boss. “We did, however, find a cut-off industrial operation in desperate need of humanitarian aid and a rescue op. We can pass that off to civilian authorities, but your orders were that all information went through your office.”

  “They are, yes,” Peyton confirmed. “What kind of industrial operation, Captain?”

  “They were supposed to be a heavy metal and fissionables refining facility,” Kelly replied. “Does it matter? They didn’t even know the Republic existed, Director. They need help.”

  “It doesn’t, I suppose,” the director said. “I’ll make sure my staff passes on the information. We’ll have a new set of scouting targets for you in a moment.”

  “Understood.” Kelly agreed. “We’ll resupply and stand by.”

  The call ended and she checked the status report on her screen. The program she’d been uploading along with the call had been fully transmitted. There shouldn’t have been a problem—the software was attached to one of the handful of one-time codes she still had left from working directly with Damien.

  A Hand’s symbol of office included software and authorizations that could override any Protectorate computer. It could also generate one-time authorization codes that could do the same thing—and Kelly now had three of Damien’s codes left.