Mountain of Mars Read online

  Instead, there were safety barriers and blast doors that slid aside and opened once the shuttle was settled, allowing the greeting party to approach the shuttle once it had cooled. Since that took about the same amount of time as it took Damien to get from the cockpit to the shuttle ramp, he didn’t see the party emerge from Olympus Mons.

  When the ramp finally extended onto the still-cooling concrete, his bodyguards went first. The pad was not yet cool enough for an unarmored human, but that was part of what exosuit battle armor was meant for. Two fully armored Marines went through the door ahead of everyone else to interface with the welcome and make sure everything was secure and safe.

  He waited another minute and then followed them down, flanked by Secret Service Agents in subtler body armor under traditional black suits.

  The advantage to moving with a group, he supposed, was it made easier to keep going when surprise might otherwise have stopped him in his tracks.

  He’d expected the neat files of Royal Guards lining his path and guarding the back of the party. He’d expected Malcolm Gregory and Kiera Alexander, both looking exhausted despite being dressed in full formal suits.

  Fortunately, Damien had expected to end up in front of cameras at some point today and had dressed in his usual suit and black gloves. The outfit had become an almost-uniform for him over the years, though the purpose of the gloves had changed.

  He’d spent most of his adult life wearing simple wrist-length gloves to cover the jump runes inlaid into his palms. Most Jump Mages did. After the Council Station incident, though, he’d switched to elbow-length thin leather gloves that were mildly painful to put on.

  The new gloves didn’t cover runes, because he didn’t have any left on his forearms or hands. They covered the scarred and ruined claws that the melting runes had left of his limbs. He was slowly regaining the use of his hands, but they were far from pretty.

  The uniform had been a good call because behind Gregory and Kiera Alexander were at least a dozen dignitaries of various assortments. He spotted four Councilors he knew, the Mayor of Olympus City, Admiral Amanda Caliver—the woman in charge of Mars Defense Command—and he figured he should know the other half-dozen.

  The twenty-plus reporters behind them suggested as much, anyway. Something more was going on here than simply the return of the deceased Mage-King’s favored Hand.

  With Secret Service Agents flanking him and Marines laying out the path forward, there was no way he could go anywhere else even if anxiety fluttered in his chest. At least the two waiting for him were old friends.

  The Chancellor of Mars bowed slightly as Damien approached. The First Hand returned the gesture, a sign of respect between the two men that political analysts figured were tied for second-most powerful individual in the Protectorate.

  “It’s good to have you home, Damien,” Gregory told him. “You made good time.”

  “I borrowed more Mages from the Navy than I should have,” Damien admitted. “It seemed urgent.”

  “It was,” Kiera interjected, the girl sounding tired.

  Damien turned to face her, and for a moment, the mask cracked. She looked at him with all of the fear and grief and exhaustion of a sixteen-year-old girl who’d just lost her entire immediate family.

  “Kiera.” He pulled her into his arms and held her tightly. “I am so sorry.”

  “I know. Thank you.”

  The moment faded and he let her go, both of them allowing the masks of their roles to take over their faces again as Kiera stepped backward to clear some space. To his surprise, she then gestured the reporters and audience forward.

  “These people are here as witnesses,” she told him. “Welcome home, Damien. You return to Our Mountain in the darkest of hours, carried on the wings of magic as only Our Hands can be. You served Our father well, and now We must ask: are you prepared to serve Us as you served him?”

  “I am,” Damien said levelly. “My life—my service—belong to Mars and the Protectorate. That oath did not die with your father.”

  “Good,” the young woman told him, her words almost lost as a cold wind whipped around the mountain and distracted everyone. Kiera smoothed her jacket and adjusted the plain gold circlet she was wearing before she nodded again and gestured to Damien.

  “Kneel,” she ordered.

  Damien knelt. He’d been through the drill before, but there wasn’t anything heavier the Mage-Queen could lay on him than the platinum Hand he already wore.

  “Damien Montgomery,” she said formally, “by Our father’s will and Our own, We name you Lord Regent of Mars.”

  Nothing had changed on the side of the mountain. It was chilly that high up on Olympus Mons, and the cold wind was picking at jackets and hair across the landing pad. Three dozen reporters, officers and dignitaries stood there, all of them stunned to silence by Kiera Alexander’s soft-spoken words.

  “Will you accept this charge?” she asked, holding out her hand to him with a golden chain hanging from it.

  That hand was small. So very small. Kiera was a delicately built young woman, barely ten centimeters taller than Damien and only slightly more heavily boned. The gold chain didn’t carry any symbol but had far heavier links than the fine chain that had held his old platinum Hand.

  The chain itself was the symbol, a length that would need to be doubled up to hang up comfortably. Damien had never seen it before—but there’d never been a Regent before. Desmond the Third had been thirty when his father died. His father had taken the throne at twenty-four.

  And Kiera was sixteen. Barely sixteen, by only a few weeks. He didn’t know what the charter rules on her regency were, but it made sense she needed one.

  He didn’t know if he could do the job, but looking up at Kiera’s tired gaze, he knew one thing: he couldn’t let her down. Not today.

  “My life and my service belong to Mars,” he echoed. “If you would have me serve as your regent, then I am yours to command.”

  Both of them knew he wasn’t able to take the chain himself. He could use magic, but that seemed…inappropriate.

  Kiera laid the chain over his shoulders herself, resting it above the platinum hand that he was charged to carry to his deathbed.

  “Thank you,” she murmured, softly enough that no one else could hear her. “I don’t think I can do this alone.”

  “You won’t have to,” Damien promised. “Malcolm and I will be with you every step of the way. No matter what, we’ll have your back.”

  She blinked away tears and gestured for him to rise. Taking his arm, she guided him to face the array of cameras.

  “We ask you all to stand as witness that Damien Montgomery has accepted the burden laid upon him,” she said loudly. It sounded like the words had been written before and she’d been practicing them.

  That was more than fair in his books.

  “Lord Montgomery has borne first Our father’s Voice and then Our father’s Hand for three years. He has been on the front lines of the war against the Republic and was instrumental in discovering the truth behind George Solace’s atrocities.

  “He has been a hero of the Protectorate as Hand and First Hand, and he will now stand as Our Voice, Our Hand and Our Sword as we move forward through this dark time.

  “People of the Protectorate, We give you your Lord Regent.”

  Thankfully, Damien was quite sure the cameras weren’t picking up his shivering under his jacket. Far from all of that was from the cold.

  7

  Damien didn’t even make it back to his quarters. He and Romanov found themselves surrounded by Royal Guards and swept off with Kiera and Malcolm to the Chancellor’s office.

  Gregory’s space was…sumptuous. The chairs were overstuffed, with active machinery in them to adjust to the form of whoever sat in them. In both Kiera and Damien’s case, the system lifted them up several centimeters to make it easier for them to see everything as well as making them more comfortable.

  There were bookshelves in the room, Damien
knew, but they were hidden behind three-meter-tall tapestries woven by artists from cultures he’d barely even heard of. Malcolm Gregory had made a hobby of finding obscure artists from half-forgotten peoples and making them famous.

  His “hobby” was probably directly responsible for the careers of half of the Protectorate’s top textile artists, especially, but it also resulted in a spectacularly gorgeous and baroque personal office.

  Food was already waiting for them, a tray tailored to each of their individual tastes…and including a French press of coffee on Damien’s versus insulated carafes on the other two trays.

  Taking advantage of the distraction, he carefully sniffed at the steaming brew before pressing the lever down. He didn’t recognize it but it smelled good.

  He poured himself a cup and took a sandwich from the tray before studying Gregory.

  “You trapped me,” he told the Chancellor. “You knew when you got me to come home.”

  “I knew that Kiera would prefer you as Lord Regent over just about anyone else,” Gregory said calmly. “I knew Desmond wanted you home to back up Kiera or Des after he passed. I didn’t know what was in his will, but I suspected.”

  “There was more in the will about you, too,” Kiera told Damien quietly. “You’re a millionaire now. Dad sliced off a portion of the Alexander fortune for you. I’ll admit I don’t remember the number—I wasn’t paying that much attention during the reading.”

  “I never served Desmond for the money,” he said grumpily. He knew his anger was as much at the loss of his mentor and friend as anything else, but that didn’t make it any less real. “He knew that.”

  “And he wanted to be sure you were taken care of, no matter what,” Kiera replied. If she was bothered by—or even noticed—his anger, she showed no sign of it. “As do I. I…I never expected this, Damien. I wasn’t trained for this.”

  She grimaced.

  “We were studying research universities for Her Majesty two weeks ago,” Malcolm Gregory said. “It will be impossible, unfortunately, for the Mage-Queen of Mars to become a research biologist.”

  “I’ll admit that’s not really my biggest problem right now,” Kiera snapped. Then she closed her eyes and took a long breath. “Apologies, Malcolm. This is hard.”

  “For all of us, but most of all for you,” Gregory told her, taking the sudden anger in stride. “Damien, right now you and I are the entire Regency Council. We’ll probably want Kiera to select some more Councilors as we go forward.”

  “Why? I trust you both,” she told them.

  “Because right now, for all intents and purposes, Damien Montgomery is the Mage-King of Mars,” the Chancellor said calmly. “The Charter says you must be nineteen to be Queen in your own right. Until then, he wields your authority.”

  “And I trust him,” Kiera repeated.

  “I know. But there is nothing currently stopping Damien and I spending the next three years using every scrap of that power to line our pockets. Hell, given that we’re writing a new Constitution right now, there’s nothing stopping us from running off with the Protectorate.”

  “Neither of which you’re going to do,” the Mage-Queen of Mars said levelly.

  “But appearances are everything,” Gregory told her. “You trust us. I trust Damien and I’m reasonably sure Damien trusts me…but the entire Protectorate is watching us. The more honorable voices we have on the Regency Council, the better we look from the outside and the safer Damien and I are from accusations of abuse of power.

  “You need to select additional Councilors to protect us. Please.”

  “I see,” Kiera conceded with a long sigh. She rubbed her face with her hands. “I…I don’t know what I’m doing, Malcolm. I just…”

  “You just lost everyone,” Damien said quietly. “And duty demands we keep going anyway. But you don’t have to do it alone.” He forced a smile. “Malcolm and I won’t let you.”

  She nodded, blinking back tears.

  “I miss them so much,” she admitted. “This wasn’t…at all what I expected.”

  “It’s a nightmare for us all,” Gregory said. “We’re with you.” He leveled his gaze on Damien.

  “And we have a lot of work to do,” he continued. “We need to brief Damien pretty heavily in the next few days, which I want you to sit in on as much of as possible, Kiera. All of us know large chunks of what Desmond was up to, but I don’t think any of us were fully briefed on everything.

  “Only Des was,” he admitted grimly.

  “What do we know about their deaths?” Damien asked.

  “Not much,” Gregory said. “It looked like a containment failure. Could have been a once-in-a-century unpredicted failure, incomplete or incompetent maintenance…a lot of things. But it does look like an accident.”

  Damien was about to argue with that, but he saw Kiera’s expression out of the corner of his eye. This was going to be hard enough for her without going over her father’s and brother’s deaths in detail.

  “What do we need to worry about first, then?”

  “We’re currently arguing out whether the formal coronation will be delayed until she takes the throne in her own right or not,” Gregory admitted. “Part of that is the mess with the planned transition from the old Charter to the new Constitution.”

  That had been the outgrowth of the agreement between Desmond and his Council that had followed the attack on Council Station. The first Mage-King’s Charter was a very loose set of rules, and the Protectorate had filled the gap with bilateral funding agreements with the member worlds and informal tradition.

  Combined with the Charter and the Compact that defined Mages’ relationship with mundane humanity, those informal traditions and bilateral agreements had built a functional interstellar state.

  But the Charter called for an advisory Council, not a true legislature. While it mostly stayed out of any given star system’s affairs, it left all interstellar law and regulation entirely in the Mage-King’s hands.

  A new Constitution was being drafted. Desmond’s death would delay that, but it would also inform it in many ways.

  “What does the Charter say?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t,” Gregory admitted. “It says she needs a Regent until she’s nineteen. You’re Lord Regent for three years, Damien.”

  “Or until I die or she finds someone better,” he replied. His Queen’s full-body wince suggested that wasn’t the right joke for today.

  “Sorry,” he apologized. “It’s hard for all of us.”

  “First big ugly on my list is that, Coronation or no, the Mage-Queen has to be presented to the Protectorate,” Gregory noted. “In this case, the Lord Regent needs to be presented as well. I’ve scheduled a proper news conference for the two of you to meet with the reporters together.

  “But Damien has to give the speech, sorry.”

  Damien hesitated, then sighed.

  “I hope you wrote it already,” he told Gregory. “My speeches are usually very short and in the style of ‘you know who I am; move or die.’”

  “I’m not sure that’s invalid for this situation,” Kiera observed. “But yes, Gregory had my father’s team write the speech. They’re used to Dad being involved in the process, but I think what they’ve given us is good.”

  “I agree. We only have two hours before that conference,” Gregory warned. “The Mountain’s PR team is going to need to swarm over both of you for clothes and makeup for at least an hour before that and you can read the speech then.”

  “At some point, I need to reach out to Sherwood,” Damien said. Grace McLaughlin was the Admiral commanding their system defense force as well as his girlfriend. She needed to know he was stuck on Mars for a long time.

  “Personal isn’t the same as important, but I’ll need RTA time for that,” he noted.

  “Of course,” Gregory agreed. “But if you’ll allow a suggestion? As soon as you’re done with the conference, the two of you need to get to the throne room. I sealed it when Desm
ond died.

  “I don’t think the Olympus Amplifier is going to lash out because of his death, but all I really know is that it’s a bloody weird piece of magic that requires a Rune Wright.”

  “It doesn’t require Runes of Power,” Kiera told the Chancellor. “I should be able to handle it myself, but I agree with waiting for Damien. We’ll go together and see what we can make of it.”

  She glanced at Damien.

  “Did Dad go through it with you at any point?” she asked.

  “I’ve seen the simulacrum in the throne room,” Damien admitted. “I’ve never interfaced with it myself. I…” He shook his head. “I didn’t get the impression from Desmond that using the Olympus Amplifier was something that could be taught. Like putting an extra Rune of Power on yourself, it’s something that only a Rune Wright can do and it’s done entirely on instinct.”

  “Speaking of Runes of Power…” Kiera noted.

  “No,” Damien told her, surprised at the fierceness in his voice. “Yes, we could use you having five Runes instead of one, but there’s a reason your father wanted you to wait until you were nineteen.

  “Even one Rune of Power is influencing how your magical strength and your body grows,” he continued. “He went through the research with me at one point, and I’m sure you have a copy of it.”

  “The research is a bunch of Mages and geneticists with no damn clue going over the records of six kids growing into adulthood,” Kiera pointed out. “That’s hardly scientifically valid.”

  “But it’s all we have. And the last thing you can afford is to risk limiting your magical power or damaging yourself,” Damien told her. “For now, you have me if we need multiple Runes.”

  “Fine.” Her tone told him the argument wasn’t over…and that was probably for the best.

  The last thing he wanted to do was get used to giving orders to his Queen.

  Red-armored and anonymous Royal Guards fell in around Damien and the Mage-Queen as they headed to the audience chamber. His security detail was tagging along as well, looking small and underequipped—if unintimidated—compared to the Guards.