Beyond the Eyes of Mars: Starship's Mage Book Twelve Read online

  “Do you have a timeline yet?” Jakab asked, looking thoughtful.

  “No, sir,” Roslyn told him. She had a few ideas for accelerating the work she hadn’t leaned on yet—she’d run with more than few gangs in her misspent youth before being side-loaded into the Academy for helping a Hand solve a problem.

  There were always options, some more acceptable than others.

  “All right,” the Vice Admiral told her. “I will speak to Commodore Ó Luain. You can carry out tests en route, but sensor installation shouldn’t take more than twenty-four hours.

  “I want Voice of the Forgotten on her way back to Pax Dramatis within thirty-six hours, if at all possible,” he continued.

  Roslyn smiled predatorily.

  “We’re going after the Legion?” she asked.

  “Somewhere out there are multiple planets that we have failed to protect,” Jakab replied. “We owe it to them to take on the Legion and restore their freedom.

  “If I’m being honest, High Command also wants to use them as a testing ground for new deployment structures and logistical protocols,” he continued. “But we have three battleship groups positioned along the frontier now, and we’re all contributing destroyers to a joint operation with our other friends.”

  That meant the Martian Interstellar Security Service, the people who operated the Protectorate’s covert magical stealth ships. A combined operation with RMN destroyers and MISS stealth ships seemed like the best way to find the Legion.

  Well, the best way after following them home, anyway.

  “We had no luck with the Trackers?” Roslyn asked. Her own operation, under Jakab’s command, had involved a mercenary bounty hunter with the rare ability to track the magical jump spell.

  The RMN also had several Trackers of their own, and she knew at least one had been deployed to help Ajam, the mercenary in question.

  “The Legion appears to have delved deeply enough into our own underworld to have learned of the Trackers and the countermeasures to them,” Jakab said quietly.

  “Few of the organized crime syndicates can afford to expend antimatter warheads against the possibility of us deploying the Trackers against them. The First Legion, on the other hand, had clear evidence that we were using Trackers.

  “They swept multiple key systems and bombarded jump zones with antimatter warheads, obliterating the signatures. While I doubt they’ll be doing so as a matter of standard jump protocol, they very effectively cut off every trail we could follow.”

  “So, we pick a region of space and search everything?” Roslyn asked. It sounded like a long and boring operation that would end in an explosion of violence. But she didn’t see any other option.

  “Exactly. And you’re one of two crews who have buried their faces deep in this,” Jakab told her. “I want you here. Make it happen, Mage-Commander. I’ll lean on Ó Luain here, but if there’s anything you can do…”

  “You push on your side and I’ll push on mine,” Roslyn promised. “We’ll be on our way inside your deadline, sir.”

  3

  Kelly LaMonte was dyeing her hair when the call came in. This was roughly a weekly activity for the petite spy, a small luxury she’d continued to allow herself even as she’d risen from junior engineer on a civilian freighter to commander of one of the Protectorate’s most complex pieces of magical technology.

  “I have three different chemicals in my hair,” she told Trixie Buday, Rhapsody in Purple’s com officer. “This better be important.”

  “Regional Director Peyton is on the Link for you, sir,” the young blonde woman replied. “She says it’s urgent.”

  Kelly grimaced as she looked at her hair, currently mid-transition from crimson red to turquoise green. She looked, in her own expert opinion, like a poorly designed Christmas decoration.

  “Link her through to my wrist-comp,” she ordered Buday. “But I don’t need to send her video.”

  Kelly’s wrist-comp rested on the counter next to the sink, allowing its holoprojectors to pop an image of Gry Peyton up to Kelly’s left. The gracefully aging woman was the Regional Director for the Martian Interstellar Security Service’s operations around Legatus, the former capital of the secessionist Republic.

  She was also Kelly’s direct boss, even though Rhapsody in Purple was currently in the Mercedes System and more closely attached to Battle Group Pax Dramatis than the MISS’s Legatus Station.

  “Whatever you’re doing, you need to drop it now,” Peyton said without any preamble.

  Kelly swallowed a sharp retort. She and Peyton did not get along, but they had worked together for several years now. This was unusual, even for Peyton.

  “I currently look like a drunk designed a candy cane,” she admitted. “What’s going on, Gry?”

  “You and I need to be on a Link with the Oversight Board in thirteen minutes,” the Director said sharply. “And I didn’t get much more notice than you did, which I am not pleased about.

  “What did you do, LaMonte?”

  “Since taking Fallen Dragon?” Kelly asked. That was the supply ship she and the Navy had taken away from the First Legion. “I’ve been ferrying the Navy’s pet Trackers around. Last five days, my crew has been doing R&R in Mercedes and keeping our heads down while waiting for Rhapsody in Verdigris to arrive.

  “I don’t think we’ve done anything to draw the Board’s attention!”

  The Protectorate was both aware of its need for a semi-covert espionage service—and of the risks born of the fact that said espionage service’s operations were inevitably on Protectorate worlds.

  MISS had a lot of authority, but that came with a lot of responsibility and a lot of checks and balances. The largest was the Oversight Board, an appointed collection of officials that included exactly one ex–field agent and only four MISS administrators—along with three civilian appointees and three former officers of the Martian Investigatory Service, their sibling law enforcement organization.

  The Board reported to the Mage-Queen of Mars and the Prince-Chancellor. Their job was to control MISS more than it was to lead MISS, but they were the top of Kelly LaMonte’s chain of command, such as it was.

  “Then I have no idea what they want,” Peyton admitted. “So, if you could find some best behavior to be on, I’d appreciate it!”

  “I guess I’m washing my hair and hoping it picks a color to stick with,” Kelly said quietly. “And I promise to behave, Director. I don’t see any reason to cause chaos today!”

  Most of the time, though, causing chaos was her job. Given that Peyton’s job was to sort through chaos to find answers for Mars, it was probably inevitable that they didn’t get along.

  Kelly’s hair was clean, dry and tied back into a ponytail when she took a seat at her desk to join the conference. It was still a twisted mix of red and green that was not particularly pleasing to her eye but that was mostly invisible to the Board.

  She hoped.

  The Link connection asked her for a sequence of security codes that no one else aboard Rhapsody in Purple would know, then required her to lock down her office at the maximum security level.

  Then the holographic conferencing software finally activated, small icons informing her that she was connected to three different Link terminals. One would be the central MISS Link terminal on Deimos. The other would be the secured MISS-only terminal on Legatus.

  She wasn’t sure where the third was, but it suggested that the Oversight Board wasn’t all in one place—and after half a decade as a spy for Mars, Kelly had to approve of that paranoia.

  Thirteen people flickered into existence around her as her office disappeared behind a projected meeting room that didn’t exist anywhere in reality.

  It put all fourteen of them equally around a table. Kelly was directly opposite from Gry Peyton, separated from her usual superior by the full breadth of the Oversight Board.

  She knew every member of the Board by name and face—she was senior enough in MISS that not knowing would have b
een unjustifiable—but she’d never spoken to any of them in person, let alone all of them.

  Part of that was that she tended to go over their heads in emergencies, since Prince-Chancellor Damien Montgomery was her ex-boyfriend and that gave her an access even some members of the Board would likely kill for.

  “Captain LaMonte, Director Peyton, thank you for joining us,” one of the Board members said briskly. It took Kelly a moment to place him: Dilshod Cortez, an Earth-born Spaniard who’d served as the head of the Martian Investigation Service for three increasingly important systems before Montgomery’s predecessor as Chancellor had recruited him for the Board.

  “We wanted to get both of your opinions of the situation with the First Legion before finalizing certain decisions that have been placed before us,” Cortez told them. “Director Peyton, if you would be so kind as to summarize what you have learned from the records on Legatus for the Board.”

  “Records on Legatus have nothing on the First Legion,” Peyton said instantly. “I have dug up personnel files for all identified members of the First Legion’s officer corps, including Admiral Ridwan Muhammad, that have been forwarded to all relevant parties.

  “We have done some research and investigation around the Second Independent Cruiser Squadron as well, but truthfully, any fully updated files around the ships, personnel or even ground units that were commandeered by Admiral Muhammad would have been at Styx Station, and we did not successfully retrieve much of Styx’s files.”

  Styx Station had been the Republic’s continuity-of-government facility, attached to their backup accelerator ring for antimatter production. While Mage-Admiral Alexander had wrecked both the ring and Styx Station, the gap between that happening and her returning with a fleet to take control of the star system had been large enough that any remaining files had been wiped.

  “Most of what we know about the First Legion comes from Fallen Dragon, the supply ship that Mage-Commander Chambers and Captain LaMonte captured,” Peyton conceded.

  “Of course,” Cortez allowed.

  If anyone on the Board hadn’t known all of that in advance, they hadn’t been doing their jobs. Kelly figured there was a shoe coming and the Board was readying the ground for it.

  “In that case then, Captain LaMonte.” He turned to Kelly. “We are not questioning the intelligence retrieved,” he said carefully, “but…your opinion of the threat level of the First Legion.”

  That was a loaded question and she grimaced.

  “To whom?” she finally asked. “To the Protectorate as a whole? Minimal. Even given time to establish new shipyards and production centers, the First Legion is unlikely to control more than four or five star systems.

  “I find it unlikely that we have lost track of enough people for those systems to have populations higher than perhaps a few dozen million apiece,” she continued. “All told, I suspect the Legion has a population base of about a hundred million people.

  “And the threat to those people, Mr. Cortez?” she asked softly. “The threat to them is existential. Whatever reason they left the Protectorate behind for, they did not intend to become slaves of a military-industrial dictatorship determined to refight the Secession.

  “There is a measurable and distinct threat to our own fringe systems,” Kelly conceded. “On the other hand, given that the Navy has multiple battleships sweeping the most likely interface points, we can safely assume that threat is neutralized.

  “The question is how far the obligation of protection inherent to the Compact spreads,” she told them. “I am not a Mage, but Her Majesty is.

  “If her Protectorate extends to all humanity, then the people on the worlds the Legion has conquered are owed some effort on our part. Even if we do not take that interpretation of the Compact, a hundred million innocents are owed some moral obligation, are they not?”

  Cortez chuckled softly.

  “Her Majesty’s position, Captain LaMonte, is very clear,” he told her. “As is the Prince-Chancellor’s, which I suspect you are more familiar with.”

  That was, Kelly hoped, the most attention anyone was going to draw to her continuing friendship with Damien Montgomery. It was no real danger to anyone—Montgomery wouldn’t let it be a danger to anyone—but her going over the Board’s head hadn’t made her any friends in this call.

  “That position is that her title calls her the Protector of Humanity, not merely the protector of the Protectorate of the Kingdom of Mars,” Cortez concluded. “While the Protectorate of Mars is the interstellar state we serve, it is the opinion of Her Majesty, Mage-Queen Kiera Alexander, that her Protectorate subsumes all of humanity.

  “Including those hundred million innocents, Captain LaMonte.”

  “So, what do you need from me, sir?” Kelly asked, glancing over at Peyton.

  “This Board is concerned, Captain, that the Navy sees this as an opportunity to play with new toys as much as anything else,” Cortez said. “Included in that is their request for basically all of our stealth ships.”

  Even Kelly wasn’t actually certain how many of the stealth ships existed. She knew that the Navy was extremely strict on what ships could be built with unrestricted amplifiers and that the technology involved in the stealth ships was both complex and expensive…but no one had ever told her how many existed.

  She knew of five. She figured there were at least two more.

  “As the Navy prepares to move battleships and dreadnoughts to a potential war zone, they also want to use our ships in combination with their own lighter vessels to find their war zone.

  “All of our efforts to date have been frustrated by unexpectedly competent operational and informational security on the part of the First Legion,” Cortez continued.

  “And you have been at the center of all of this, Captain LaMonte. So. In your opinion, is the deployment of our stealth ship assets in support of the Navy operation justified?”

  Kelly gently bit her own tongue to stop herself rushing into the answer. She could see why the Board was asking her, but for all that she’d done, she was still just one of the stealth-ship captains and not a senior-enough agent to normally be having these conversations with the Board.

  She wasn’t much short of those lofty heights—Gry Peyton, for example, had weekly meetings with the Board, and Kelly reported directly to her—but to be asked her opinion of something that major in her first meeting with the Oversight Board was nerve-wracking.

  To her surprise, though, Peyton met her gaze and gave her an encouraging nod. Swallowing down her moment of caution, she marshaled her thoughts.

  “As of this moment,” she said slowly, “Rhapsody in Purple and Rhapsody in Verdigris are already assigned to this operation. It would not be reasonable to redeploy us without a critical mission elsewhere, so I presume we are talking about assigning additional units to this operation?”

  Cortez nodded silently.

  “Every stealth ship assigned to the survey operation increases the number of systems we can sweep simultaneously and, therefore, reduces the time period until we find the Legion,” she told the Board. “Every day we have not found the Legion’s stars is a day that we cannot rescue their enslaved populations.

  “Assuming that the Navy is prepared to put at least destroyers up to support our scout ships, I can easily justify the deployment of a functionally infinite number of assets,” Kelly concluded. “The question then becomes opportunity costs. I am not aware, I’m afraid, of our total number of stealth ships and what operations they are on.

  “Lacking that information, I would suggest that we deploy half of our stealth assets in support of this operation, keeping the remaining units in regular deployment.

  “Selection of which units to deploy should be based on their current operations, with preference given to ships that can rapidly clear their responsibilities.”

  There was a silence around the virtual table, and Kelly thought she’d gone too far for a moment.

  Then one of the women chuckled.
Elidi Borysov, Kelly identified her—the one ex–field agent on the Board.

  “Told you all,” Borysov said drily. “She’s the one.”

  “I agree,” Cortez said instantly. “We’ve already discussed this. Any new objections?”

  The conference was silent—not least because of Kelly’s own confusion.

  Cortez waited for a moment, then pointed a finger at Kelly.

  “Congratulations, LaMonte, you’re now the Director of Stealth Ship Operations,” he told her. “You now report directly to us. We’ll have the HQ team for SSO update you on the ship status, but you are authorized and expected to provide the Navy with four stealth ships for their operations against the First Legion.

  “Selection of which ships, other than Purple and Verdigris, is at your discretion once you’re up to speed on the current missions of your new subordinates.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Kelly said carefully, a bit taken aback as she considered just what that was going to mean for her workload. “I…uh…should probably get to work, then?”

  “One last thing,” Borysov said, before anyone could tell her to go. “Because you’ll be working with the Navy, this role comes with the courtesy rank of Commodore. You still remain a civilian and an MISS operative, but you are not expected to play subordinate to military officers.

  “Our preference, if we are committing this many assets to the operation, is that overall command of the survey sweep rests with you.”

  Kelly swallowed and nodded. That could come back to bite her, but she saw the Board’s point.

  “That will be a discussion I will have to have with Vice Admiral Jakab,” she finally concluded. “Or whoever ends up in command.”

  “Once you have found the First Legion’s territory, Masamune will move forward and collect the assorted battleship groups,” Cortez told her. “The Navy definitely wants to send in a dreadnought, which means that Admiral Medici will take command of what I understand will be incorporated as Seventh Fleet.