Mountain of Mars Read online

  Without using magic, which the situation hardly called for, it took Damien a full five minutes to get from the shuttle bay to the heavily armored missile magazine that had been turned into the Link communication center.

  If the Republic had some ability to use the sanitized communicator as a weapon, he wished them luck with damaging the dreadnought through armor designed to control containment failure on antimatter warheads.

  The entrance was secured, but a wordless exchange between the Marines on both sides got Damien through without slowing down. Normally, he’d complain about that—security procedures helped everyone, even if he was probably the most recognizable person on the ship—but he was already late.

  The room he entered was surprisingly quiet for that. The crew had set up seating for the press gallery through the room, but the focus was on the big video-call screen that had been set up just for this.

  An interstellar videoconference was new for the Protectorate. They’d probably find better and more useful ways to communicate with the Link over time, but right now they had two fully sanitized units.

  One aboard the most powerful warship in the fleet and the other at Mars…and the call had been supposed to start several minutes earlier.

  He could feel the reporters’ gazes following him as he walked up the aisle to Admiral Alexander. His bodyguards spread out behind him, joining Alexander’s bodyguards along the walls.

  Just their personal details alone left the room feeling like it was lined with soldiers. It was only a dozen or so people, but Damien was considering the look and vibe of the guardians’ presence. It…wasn’t good.

  On the other hand, the Republic had managed to infiltrate assassins aboard Martian warships before. The Navy thought they’d cleaned up the leftovers of that, but they couldn’t be sure.

  “They’re late,” Alexander said softly. “There’s no reason for them to be late.”

  “I’m late,” he told her. “The talks ran long—but I have the news we were hoping to give His Majesty on this call.”

  “They’re surrendering?” she asked.

  “They made it very clear that they only spoke for Legatus itself,” Damien said. “The local Republic officers have signed off as well, but this is functionally only a surrender of the planetary government.

  “But I have them in contact with the Marines, and plans are being drafted as we speak.” He shook his head. “Occupying a planet isn’t an easy task, but we can at least get started.”

  “Good.” Alexander looked at the video screen, currently showing the stylized rocket-and-red-planet seal of the Royal Martian Navy. The reporters were starting to get restless, though they’d so far respected the quiet conversation of the two people at the front of the room.

  “I thought the call was supposed to start by now,” one of them finally called. “What’s going on?”

  “We don’t know,” Damien replied, turning to face the audience. “Remember that this was scheduled by a courier ship that left Mars almost five days ago. Things change in five days, people. Some delays are to be expected.”

  It was going to be irritating if the big event they’d scheduled fell through. A non-event here would be lost beneath the news already going out from the reporters who’d accompanied him to the surface.

  “Legatus Surrenders!” made for better headlines than “Interstellar Phone Call a Bust.” He hoped, anyway.

  “They’re ten minutes late,” Alexander muttered. “Desmond is never late.”

  “Not without being delayed, anyway,” Damien agreed. “Something’s happening. Is the system working?”

  “We’ve been running data pings back and forth for twelve hours,” she told him. “We weren’t going to let the big video call be the actual first use of the Link without making sure it worked. It’s just connection pings, but we know the system is online.”

  “I think we need to call home, Admiral,” he said. “I know it was supposed to come from Mars for the best effect, but—”

  The screen dissolved into a moment of black, then the image of a single man appeared on the other side.

  That wasn’t right. There’d been supposed to be a crowd of reporters, with the Mage-King and the Crown Prince standing in front—much like the setup here in Legatus. Instead, there was just one man—a man Damien Montgomery knew.

  Malcolm Gregory was the Chancellor of the Protectorate, the man who stood at the Mage-King’s right hand and managed much of the day-to-day operation of running an interstellar state.

  “Damien, Jane,” he greeted them. He was a large man, usually jovially smiling in a way that led some to underestimate his intelligence or competence. Today, Gregory looked haggard and exhausted.

  “There’s not much point in sending the reporters away,” he continued. “They’ll know soon enough and the news will spread fast enough. I almost forgot this was scheduled in the chaos, and my message is being relayed from the Mountain.”

  Damien wished he were sitting as he reached out and grabbed the edge of the lectern. Somehow, he knew what was coming—but it was impossible!

  “There was a shuttle accident en route to Research Station Deimos-Three. Mars One was destroyed with both His Majesty and His Highness aboard,” Gregory said, the words flowing in a rush like a broken dam.

  “Desmond Michael Alexander the Third and Crown Prince Desmond Michael Alexander are both dead.”

  He paused, frozen for several long seconds before he shook his head.

  “First Hand Montgomery, Admiral Alexander. We need to talk in private,” he told them. “I’m sure that’s scoop enough to appease the press gallery, but we must speak to the future.”

  Damien turned to face the reporters again, many of whom had the same glassy-eyed expression he could feel his own face trying to assume.

  “Please, everyone,” he told them. “If you could vacate the conference room quickly. This has now become a matter of national security. Admiral Alexander and I will be relocating, but we will be locking down the Link center.”

  He should probably have checked with Alexander, but he had a pretty solid idea of where the Admiral was. Damien was nearly in shock, but Desmond the Third had “merely” been his King and his mentor.

  He’d been Jane Alexander’s older brother. Damien didn’t even need to look at her to know that she was in shock.

  3

  By the time they were in the smaller meeting room that had been put aside for the planned follow-up call with the Mage-King, everything was starting to sink in on Damien. He focused on supporting Alexander, who hadn’t said a word since Gregory’s statement.

  He guided her to a seat, then put a coffee in front of her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She shook her head mutely, then slowly exhaled a long sigh.

  “No,” she finally said. “Desmond… Des… FUCK.”

  Damien looked back at the door to meet Romanov’s eyes. The Marine gave him a crisp salute—and then sealed the room, leaving the two Rune Wrights alone.

  The First Hand of Mars knew a lot now about how the Mage-King’s family had made sure they didn’t lose the Rune Wright gift. Jane Alexander, like her brother, was an eighty-percent clone of their father…who’d been a full clone of his father.

  She’d been born ten years later as the spare heir in case Desmond died before having kids. Damien doubted anyone had been expecting the hard-edged Admiral to have kids of her own at any point, but given the cloning and genetic engineering involved, well.

  Damien suspected that the next generation of the Alexanders was going to have a significant chunk of his DNA in them. The doctors responsible for the process were working off a limited certainty of just what made a Rune Wright versus an ordinary Mage.

  “That makes Kiera Queen, doesn’t it?” he asked softly.

  “It does,” Gregory’s voice answered, the Chancellor linked in once again. “She’s…gods, she’s handling it better than I feared, but I’m not sure it’s real for her yet. It’s only been
an hour.”

  “That poor child,” Alexander murmured.

  “She’s stronger than you think, but this is a lot to dump on her,” Gregory replied. “She can’t take this alone.” He exhaled. “She also only has one Rune of Power yet, and I stand by the doctors’ and Desmond’s insistence she not get the rest until she’s nineteen.

  “We say an Alexander must sit the throne at Olympus Mons, but the three of us know it needs to be a Rune Wright. With Kiera so young, we need a second Wright.” Gregory swallowed. “I need one of you to come home.”

  “We just finished negotiating the surrender of one world,” Damien pointed out. “Ten systems seceded with the Republic and we only scattered their fleet; we didn’t destroy it. I don’t expect all of the deserters to return to the fold, but they still have a fleet even if no one rejoins them.”

  “That’s why I can’t go,” Alexander agreed. “This is war, Damien. You exposed their atrocities, opened a massive crack in their armor, but you’re not a soldier. Not an Admiral. The Sword of Mars isn’t needed here.

  “But I am,” she continued. “I command the fleet, and with Legatus secured, we’ll be moving out against Nueva Bolivia within the next few weeks. We’re just waiting on a new load of missiles to refill our magazines.”

  They’d expended most of their new-generation Phoenix IX and Samurai I missiles in the battle for Legatus. The missiles currently in their magazines were the only new missiles they had left.

  Freighters were hauling tens of thousands of missiles to Legatus to fill the Navy’s colliers with the new weapons, but right now, the only reloads available to Alexander were the older weapons they’d started the war with.

  “I’m not an Alexander,” Damien countered. He was torn. He wanted to go back to Mars, to hold his friend’s daughter while she grieved and support her as the new Mage-Queen, but he also had to think about the Protectorate. One of them had to lead the fleet as they finished off the Republic.

  And one of them had to go home.

  “That’s an argument for sending you, not me,” Alexander replied. “Since Des turned ten, we’ve been doing everything in our power to convince everyone to forget I was ever the Crown Princess.”

  “You are the heir again now,” Gregory pointed out.

  “Which is, again, why it has to be Damien,” she snapped. “We don’t want people looking at the teenage girl and then looking at her aunt the Admiral and going, ‘Wouldn’t the aunt make a better Queen?’ We can’t risk it, Gregory. I agree we need an adult Rune Wright on Mars to back Kiera up.

  “But it can’t be me. There are too many risks—and I’d do a shitty job at what you need, anyway. You need a politician, not a soldier.”

  “I’m not a politician either,” Damien countered. “You’re family.”

  “So are you,” Jane Alexander barked. “You are not that fucking blind, Damien Montgomery. Blood be damned, you’re an Alexander in our hearts and the entire damn Protectorate knows it.”

  It was a good thing he was sitting. Because, apparently, he was just that blind.

  It didn’t help. He’d already lost two people he regarded as dear friends. To lose family he hadn’t, quite, realized he had…that was worse. That hurt more.

  “I’m not a politician,” he repeated.

  “But you are a diplomat in a way I’m not,” Alexander told him. “You’ve been in the middle of the negotiations with the Council for a while now. Hell, Damien, you’ve brokered peace treaties and mutual-usage agreements over entire star systems.

  “I’m barely aware that there is a Constitution being drafted right now. How much do you know about it?”

  Damien sighed.

  “His Majesty was sending me updates on the process,” he admitted. “It’s a mess. The first Mage-King really should have done a better job of setting this up.”

  “He had the Charter and the Compact, and they laid out what he needed,” Gregory replied. “Everyone knelt to Mars and no one fucked with the Mages. Everything else was irrelevant to him.”

  “And our Desmond was trying to lay a foundation for the next two hundred years,” Damien said, blinking back hot tears. “Damn it. What happened, Malcolm?”

  “No one’s sure yet. Everyone’s going over sensor data in detail, but we’re pretty sure no one shot at them. Best guess is a maintenance failure.”

  “Or a bomb,” Damien said grimly.

  “We’re pretty sure we’ve cleaned up the RID’s cells on Mars,” Gregory replied. “I don’t know who else would try to kill Desmond. It may just have been an accident.”

  All three of them choked up, and Damien sighed and bowed his head.

  “I know it has to be one of us,” he said softly. “I just…”

  “Desmond wanted you to come home if something happened to him,” Gregory said softly. “For Des or Kiera, he knew you’d be the best to back them up. They both trusted Jane—but they both knew you.”

  “One of us has to fight the war and one of us has to hold the Protectorate together,” Jane concluded. “Do you really think that the Protectorate will do better the other way around?”

  “No,” he conceded, choking back tears as he stared down at his gloved hands. “No. Very well, Chancellor. Duke of Magnificence and I will be back in Mars in five days.”

  Once, he could have gone faster. But that had been before he wrecked his hands. The elbow-length thin black leather gloves he wore covered skin and bone reduced to a scarred mess by the molten metal that had been his jump runes and two of his Runes of Power.

  Now he had to rely on others to bring him home.

  4

  Damien made it most of the way back to his shuttle in a state of shock, with Romanov and Niska trailing in his wake with the rest of his escort. Neither his bodyguard commander or the Legatan spy who’d been acting as his “local guide” for the last few months said anything.

  What was there to say? Desmond the Third had been the Mage-King of Mars for over seventy years. His father had ruled longer, but only by a few years—and given Desmond’s health, the government had already been quietly planning the celebration of him becoming the longest-reigned Mage-King.

  The bedrock that had underlain Martian and human politics for decades was gone. They’d recover and the Protectorate would survive and go on, but to lose both the Mage-King and the Crown Prince in a single day was a shock to the system that it would take time to process.

  Time Damien was grimly aware they might not get. The Republic was bloodied, its capital in Martian hands, but they were far from beaten. The Lord Protector and key Members of the Republican Assembly had fled.

  What was left of the Assembly hadn’t even been involved in the surrender negotiations. Everybody appeared to regard them as irrelevant now—including the remaining MRAs themselves.

  And Damien was left with his own suspicions around what had happened to his King. He’d clashed with the Royal Order of the Keepers of Secrets and Oaths, a secret organization set up by the first Mage-King before, but he had a great many questions about what had happened to them.

  They’d vanished into the darkness in an unexpected spasm of violence on Mars that had ended in an attack on the Council and Mage-King alike. That attack had left Damien without the use of his hands—and with the grim certainty that someone had moved against both the Keepers and the Protectorate.

  “My lord!”

  Damien’s mental enumeration of their potential enemies had brought him all the way into the shuttle bay, where a familiar young redheaded woman was waiting for him.

  There was little of the teenager he’d originally met, in jail for vandalism and assault at the time, left in the image that Mage-Lieutenant Roslyn Chambers projected now. She saluted crisply once he met her gaze.

  “I heard the news,” she said. “The Admiral says you’re heading back to Mars?”

  “I am,” he confirmed. “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to catch up, Lieutenant. We’ve both been busy.”

  “I know,”
Chambers replied. “I want to say thank you before you left. Without your help, I’m not sure I’d have ever made it into the Navy at all.”

  “We’d all be worse off if that had been the case, wouldn’t we?” Damien asked. “You and Captain Kulkarni have been instrumental in getting us this far, and every report I’ve seen from Nia Kriti says we wouldn’t have either of you if you hadn’t been on that sensor console.”

  “Thank you, my lord. That means a lot, coming from you,” she admitted.

  “Even if I could be here to watch over you, Lieutenant, I suspect I’d be wasting both our time,” he told her. “I have every faith in your ability to support Admiral Alexander in the days to come.”

  “This war is far from over,” she told him grimly. “We need to know the Protectorate is okay behind us.”

  “Leave that to me,” he promised. “You and Admiral Alexander just need to deal with the Republic and Legatus.”

  He paused, considering the shuttle in front of them. Then he gestured for Roslyn to step out of the way of traffic while he turned to James Niska.

  “Speaking of which, James,” he addressed the old cyborg, “I need you to stay here. Not necessarily on Durendal, but in Legatus and supporting the Admiral.”

  “I’m…not sure how much good I can do here anymore,” Niska admitted. “I’m a traitor by any reasonable standard.”

  “You know Legatus better than any of us,” Damien replied. “You know the Republic and the UnArcana Worlds in a way no one who wasn’t on the inside ever could. You helped build the Republic.”

  “And now you want me to help destroy it,” the Legatan said sadly.

  “The Republic’s leaders already destroyed it,” Damien said. “They buried any truth or honor in blood and lies. We both know this. But there was a reason they convinced ten star systems to follow them into war.

  “Someone has to speak for the UnArcana Worlds as we fight this war,” he continued. “Someone has to stand at Admiral Alexander’s side and speak for the people behind the face of the enemy.