Sword of Mars Read online

  “You know, the height can be deceptive, but I think you’ve aged more than I have,” he observed. “Are the rumors about your hands true?”

  “That I’m a cripple?” Damien asked flatly. “Basically. Don’t think I couldn’t destroy you.”

  “I didn’t come alone any more than you did,” Niska pointed out. “I’m not your enemy.”

  “A hundred thousand dead in the Antonius System at the hands of an LMID agent disagree,” the Hand replied. “I don’t even know how many people have died in the war your Republic has started. If you’re not my enemy, you’ve got a lot of talking to do.”

  “Antonius was a fucking nightmare,” Niska said grimly.

  Antonius was a sparsely inhabited mining system that Damien’s home system of Sherwood shared jurisdiction of with another star system. A Legatus Military Intelligence Directorate operation had tried to start a war over Antonius—and had destroyed two significantly sized outposts along the way.

  “Blade was a psychopath and we didn’t realize just how bloodthirsty the bastard was,” the older LMID agent told Damien. “He’s dead, if that makes you feel better. Ricket would have sent you his head in a fucking gift box if he’d thought we could get away with it.”

  “And that’s somehow supposed to make up for the dead?”

  “No.” The older man shook his head. “We were preparing for war, Montgomery. Now we’re at war. I may not agree with everything my government decided to do, but there was never any question in my mind which side I was on.”

  “Then why the hell are you here?” Damien asked.

  “Because those are my orders,” Niska told him. “Case Prodigal Son was…bullshit. The kind of contingency plan you throw into the mix because you feel it needs to be there but you never expect to use.

  “Except Ricket activated it…and so far as I can tell, he’s dead,” the agent said bluntly. “So is just about every other LMID agent who didn’t get absorbed by the Republic.”

  “I thought LMID was the Republic?”

  “LMID works for Legatus, not the Republic,” Niska corrected. “A lot of our people went over to the Republic Intelligence Directorate, but LMID remained independent under Director Bryan Ricket.

  “And then he sent out the Prodigal Son codes…shortly before someone murdered him.” The cyborg shook his head. “There were about sixty LMID senior agents left. We’d gone from being the primary sword of Legatus to being a second-string network mostly responsible for counterintelligence on Legatus itself.

  “Except now everyone’s dead. Someone wanted to be very sure that whatever Ricket discovered didn’t survive him.”

  “I’m not seeing how this is my problem,” Damien replied. “I can probably trade amnesty for everything you know about the Republic, but you didn’t need to contact me for that.”

  “No.” Niska was silent for several seconds. “Montgomery…we need to talk away from the crowd. In private, where I can access media systems. Which means you need to trust me.”

  “I don’t,” Damien told him. “So, you might be out of luck.”

  “Montgomery…My Lord Hand. My boss—my friend—died because of something he found out about the Republic. Something that my leaders decided was worth killing one of their fanatic loyalists to keep from getting out.

  “I have enough to point us in the right direction. But if Bryan found something that he ordered me to defect over, then my government can’t be what I think it is,” Niska said quietly. “I know you can’t trust me, not really, but I need you to give me this much.”

  He snorted.

  “Besides, I don’t think either of us has any illusions about how I’d fare against even a crippled Hand.”

  It almost sounded like Niska was extracting the title from himself with pliers. Damien certainly hadn’t expected the Republic agent to use it.

  “Fine,” he said. “My men are coming with me, though. Just in case you’ve had any clever ideas.”

  “Fair enough,” Niska told him, then grimaced. “I’m glad at least one of us did bring security. I was bluffing.”

  3

  The Six Red Seasons Hotel had a dozen conference rooms of any size a guest might want to use. This being Amber, you could pay extra to have the security cameras turned off—and even more for a rental jammer and white-noise generator.

  Niska had brought his own and set it up in the middle of the room as Damien’s bodyguards swept the room. The Hand shared a nod with Mage-Captain Denis Romanov as the guards completed their sweep.

  There were no unexpected bugs in the room, and Niska’s device was shutting down every one that was there.

  Romanov was both a Royal Martian Marine Corps Mage-Captain and a Special Agent of the Protectorate Secret Service. He was in charge of Damien’s personal security and looked much like his boss. He added another forty centimeters to the same slim and dark-haired build, however, which made him much more intimidating than his boss.

  “Denis, you stay with us,” Damien ordered. “Have your people secure the outside.”

  The usual wordless conversation of security professionals followed and Romanov propped himself up next to the door as his agents trooped out.

  “All right, Major Niska,” he addressed the LMID man. “You wanted privacy. Talk.”

  “I haven’t been a Major in a while,” Niska told him. “Moved into Director Ricket’s personal staff after the Chrysanthemum operation. Coordinating operations in Protectorate space.”

  He sighed.

  “I’ll give you a list of the operations and agents I know,” he conceded before Damien could even ask. “That’s basically what my orders were, anyway.”

  “This ‘Prodigal Son’ case?” the Hand asked.

  “Yeah. It’s an order to defect,” Niska said calmly. “Nothing held back. We’re supposed to go over to the Protectorate and give you everything. I wrote the damn case, Montgomery. I never expected to see it activated.

  “Only Director Ricket could activate it,” he continued. “It’s an emergency alert and a drastic one. It would only be sent if the Director felt that the Republic had betrayed Legatus.”

  “How is that even possible?” Damien demanded. “The Republic is Legatus.”

  “Legatus is the capital of the Republic. That does not mean that the Republic and Legatus are the same thing with the same interests,” Niska countered. “Usually, yes, but Legatus continues to have our own interests.

  “The Republic was created to pursue those interests, but it is its own entity.” He shook his head. “I can’t see any way that the Republic could betray Legatus…but I suppose it could certainly betray Legatus’s people.

  “In which case the Republic has betrayed its own people.”

  Niska pulled a portable holo-projector from his coat and tossed it on the table. It activated, showing a screenshot of a classified ads page from the Legatus datanet.

  Four of the ads were highlighted, making up some message.

  “There are a bunch of layers of cipher and bullshit built into this, but this was the message that was sent out,” Niska told Damien. Three words appeared across the screenshot.

  Activate Prodigal Son.

  “There’s authentication and so forth,” he continued. “But it’s an emergency signal, so only so much. I validated it and got off-planet. Traded access to a ship with a Jump Mage who’d really pissed off his prior Captain, got us both out of the Republic.

  “I have no evidence that any other LMID agents managed to make it out,” Niska said quietly. “And I know at least fifteen died while I was getting my own ass out of dodge. Something very wrong went down in Legatus, Montgomery.”

  “So, what do you know?” Damien asked.

  Niska nodded and tapped a command on his wrist-comp. The screenshot disappeared and was replaced by a rotating globe that Damien recognized as Legatus.

  Four blue icons marked it. All of them were in isolated areas, well away from the main centers of a heavily populated world.

  �
�Twenty years ago, the Royal Testers and the UnArcana Worlds had one of their recurring fights,” Niska explained. “The result was these. Each of the UnArcana Worlds supports at least one isolated boarding school for the purpose of teaching Mages by Right until they’re old enough to decide what they want to do with their lives.

  “About half were being emigrated to other worlds by their parents, but the Testers insisted that we had to have some structure for those that wanted to stay.”

  It was the job of the Royal Testers to meet with every child in the Protectorate at some point between the ages of ten and twelve to test them for the Gift of magic. For the children born to the semi-aristocratic Mage families that ran many of the Protectorate’s worlds, it was almost a formality. It was extraordinarily rare for a child of two Mages to not be a Mage.

  For the rest of the children of the Protectorate, it was only slightly less of a formality. It was even rarer for a Mage to be born to non-Mage parents than vice versa—but across the teeming billions of humanity, it happened a surprising amount. A world of a billion souls would turn up at least two dozen Mages by Right every year—like Damien himself.

  Even with the emigration of young Mages from the UnArcana Worlds, they still would have had schools supporting hundreds of teenagers who hadn’t decided if they were going to stay and give up the use of their Gifts or leave.

  Now, Damien supposed, they had even fewer choices. Without the Testers, though, few Mages by Right would be found at all. The schools would close and the potential Mages would be lost in the populace.

  “I didn’t realize the Republic was still running those schools,” Damien said. “I’m not sure I see the relevance, though.”

  “Neither did I when Ricket started asking questions,” Niska replied. “I’m not even sure what he was looking into, but I know it involved the schools on Legatus. There were other aspects to what he was investigating, but I think he knew he was in dangerous waters.”

  “Why?” Damien asked.

  “Because I was his right-hand man on Legatus for four years, and I only had the vaguest idea that he had a side investigation running,” the LMID agent replied. “None of our people were engaged in it. He was doing it all himself…and he found something that he ordered us all to run over.

  “He didn’t even get whatever it was into our hands, but he ordered us to run anyway,” Niska concluded. “And someone killed over a dozen loyal operatives of the Republic just in case they’d received any data from him.”

  “You think something’s happened with those kids?” Damien asked. “Why would you care?”

  Niska was better than many Damien had met, but the man was still one of the enforcers of a society that basically jailed those children and made them either give up their powers or go into exile.

  “Because they’re kids,” the cyborg snapped. “And because the promise was that their curriculum and opportunity to leave would be honored. But most of all? I care because someone killed Bryan Ricket over it.”

  “And what do you want me to do about it?” Damien asked.

  “I need resources and support to try and find out what Ricket discovered,” Niska said calmly. “I need your help to get back in Republic space and finish what my boss—my friend—started.”

  “We can’t get into Legatus to complete his investigation,” Damien replied. That wasn’t entirely true, but he wasn’t going to admit that he had access to a hyper-advanced stealth ship. He was prepared to help Niska, especially since it seemed like there was a wedge there that they could use against the Republic, but he wasn’t giving up his secrets yet.

  “I have enough documentation, access, false papers, et cetera, to get us into any Republic system except Legatus,” Niska told him. “These schools were in every system. One of the larger ones was in the Arsenault System, which should be relatively easily reached from here.

  “I don’t have a Jump Mage, though. My deal with the woman who got me here was to get her out of the Republic. So, I have a ship, I have a destination, I have access…but I don’t have a Jump Mage, I don’t have personnel and I don’t have firepower.”

  “You want me to provide a crew and a Mage for your ship?” Damien asked. He could do that, but it was risky.

  “I have a crew,” Niska admitted. “I have two other LMID Augments and a crew that got me out of the Republic without betraying me. I need a Mage. I could use more gun hands and I could use more weapons.

  “I’m assuming you can get all of that.”

  “I am the First Hand of the Mage-King of Mars,” Damien said quietly. “If I believe this is worth it, I can get anything.”

  He met Niska’s gaze and the cyborg looked back at him levelly.

  “I want to avenge my friend,” the cyborg said quietly. “From your perspective? My friend was one of the loyalists at the heart of the Republic. Whatever he found broke that loyalty. If it turned Bryan Ricket against the nation he helped build, it could break the Republic.

  “And if something that can break the Republic exists, then maybe the Republic deserves to be broken.”

  4

  Rhapsody in Purple was one of the most technologically advanced ships in the galaxy. Hanging in Amber orbit, the ship was using a number of signature-augmenting panels to appear like a regular courier ship.

  She was actually slightly larger than a regular courier ship, but the angles and absorbent materials used to build her hull made her nearly invisible to regular radar. She was also one of the very few ships in human space to use an antimatter power core as well as antimatter engines.

  The saved space was used for additional quarters and several immense heat sinks, allowing her to run dark and cold for extended periods.

  There were only a handful of stealth ships like her, and Damien had commandeered her to get him to Amber. He normally traveled on a cruiser, but the war meant the Navy couldn’t spare the ship anymore.

  “Welcome back aboard,” Rhapsody’s Captain, Kelly LaMonte, greeted him, with a crisp salute.

  He gave her a Look. The currently aqua-blue-haired Martian Interstellar Security Service officer was his ex-girlfriend. She knew perfectly well what he thought of any level of formality.

  MISS wasn’t overly formal in general—both of LaMonte’s spouses served aboard Rhapsody in Purple, and he was frankly surprised she even knew how to salute.

  “You know better than to salute,” he told her. “I need your conference room, you, and your top crew in twenty minutes. Denis”—he turned back to his bodyguard—“you as well. We need to make a plan for how we’re taking advantage of Niska’s situation.”

  “So, we’re in for this, are we?” LaMonte asked. “Just what did the old cyborg want from us?”

  “A Mage and backup as he goes back into the Republic to try and find the secret they killed the head of LMID over,” Damien told her. “We’ll talk in the meeting. I want as many brains pointed at this as possible.

  “I think we’ve got a solid opportunity here, but any of us wandering into the Republic is dangerous.”

  “And let me guess…you’re going with him?” LaMonte asked.

  “I don’t trust Niska as far as I can throw a planet,” he replied. “And he’s going to have a hard time trapping me.”

  LaMonte and her spouses Xi Wu, Rhapsody’s senior Ship’s Mage, and Mike Kelzin, the senior shuttle pilot, took up a good chunk of the conference table on their own. Rhapsody in Purple was also represented by the immense Amazonian form of Captain Jalil Charmchi of the Bionic Combat Regiment of the Protectorate Special Operations Command.

  Damien was reasonably sure that Legatan Augments were superior to the gear available to Major Charmchi and her platoon of cyborg commandos. He also had no intention of mentioning that to a shaven-headed, cybernetically-augmented woman who towered over Denis Romanov, let alone Damien himself.

  Romanov stood behind and to Damien’s right. At some point, he’d reassemble the type of staff he’d taken into half a dozen crises before. He hadn’t had tim
e since his humanitarian mission into Republican space a few months before had turned into the opening act of a war.

  Right now, he had his Secret Service detail and a few Marines, plus LaMonte’s crew.

  “So, Niska is defecting,” he said bluntly. “He’s promised us a full dump of what he knows about Republic operations in our space and past LMID operations. The latter should at least let us clean up some of the debris left over from their little shadow war.”

  “What does he want in exchange?” Charmchi demanded. “Spies don’t hand that sort of thing over freely.”

  “I’d be happy to hand him amnesty for that data dump and bury him in a fancy apartment on some world on the far side of the Protectorate,” Damien told them. “However, he’s here because the Republic had Bryan Ricket, the current head of LMID and Niska’s boss, murdered.”

  Everyone in the little conference room took a moment to process that.

  “Niska is convinced Ricket found something the Republic was prepared to kill one of their key loyalists to keep secret,” the Hand continued. “He is, in fact, convinced that Ricket found something that turned said key loyalist against the Republic.

  “He wants to find out what Ricket died for. I want whatever secret Ricket found—because frankly, people, if this secret could turn the head of LMID against the Republic, I want to see who else it can turn.”

  “So, what do we do? Pick him up and head into Republic space?” LaMonte asked.

  “I’m uninclined to reveal the existence of the Rhapsodies to even a defected enemy agent,” Damien told her. “I think he’s aboveboard, but this could easily be a long game to see what we’ll expose of our intelligence operations.”

  “Or to trap the First Hand,” Romanov pointed out.

  “That’s a risk I have to take,” Damien replied. “What information Niska has suggests that this is related to the Mages by Right in the Republic. My worst-case scenario right now is that I’m going to be finding mass graves.”