Mountain of Mars Read online

  It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t really an answer, either. Denis Romanov wasn’t sure what guarding Montgomery would entail now.

  “I do,” Spader told him. “It can’t be a secondment, Romanov. There’s no moving on from the Guard. If you join us, you are no longer a Marine. You are no longer Secret Service. You are a Royal Guard.”

  “You can’t make a Marine not a Marine,” Denis replied.

  “I can if I call him to a higher cause,” she snapped. “There can be no divided loyalties or questions of command, Denis Romanov. The Guard can have only one commander: me. Only one master: Kiera Alexander.

  “You are a fully trained Combat Mage with more direct battle experience than ninety percent of the Corps. You are a perfect candidate for the Guard, and given the circumstances, we would bring you across as a Lieutenant—the same rank I received when I joined.”

  Denis didn’t need her to clarify that a Royal Guard Lieutenant was paid—and treated, for authority purposes—at the same level as an RMMC Colonel. She was effectively offering him a promotion, but the price…

  “We spent a lot of time indoctrinating Marines with the claim that you never stop being a Marine,” he told her softly.

  “It serves a purpose. But now I call you to serve a larger one, Denis Romanov. You were a Marine before. You’ve been Secret Service for two years. You’ve stood at Montgomery’s side through more battles and crises than I suspect even I know about.

  “Will you follow him into this challenge and stand at his side when he faces the highest duty the Protectorate can demand? Or will you cling to the legends of the Marines?”

  “I’m sure there are better ways to phrase that,” Denis said drily, looking out at the plains of Mars. “To be a Marine…is central to who I am.”

  “And it was central to who I was,” Spader replied gently. “But what is more important, in the end, Romanov? The name or the oath? An identity or the service you took up?”

  “What happens when Damien is no longer Regent?”

  “We have three years to sort that out,” she said with a snort. “But I’m leaning towards we never let a Rune Wright wander around without Royal Guards again. I’m starting to feel like they’re more vulnerable than they think they are.”

  Denis shivered at a memory from one of his first missions with Damien. The Hand had halted an orbital bombardment with his magic, saving thousands of lives—including Denis’s own—but had fallen into a coma and needed to be carried to safety.

  “Far more vulnerable,” he admitted. “No such thing as an ex-Marine, though, sir.”

  “No. Only Marines who transcended that to become something more,” she agreed. “Are you with me?”

  “For Mars,” Denis said quietly. “I’m with you.”

  10

  Exhaustion had claimed Damien before he could take on Gregory’s second “big ugly.” The morning saw him something resembling fresh and refreshed, so he and Kiera met at the throne room before they’d even eaten.

  There were no Secret Service Agents in his detail this morning. Two armored Royal Guards trailed in his wake as he and Kiera approached a space that was rarely open to the public. The audience hall he’d given his speech from was probably closer to the usual connotations of throne room than the actual throne room of Olympus Mons.

  Heavy blast doors sealed the entrance. Even if an attacker somehow managed to penetrate this deep into the Mountain, past every other layer of security, those doors would resist nuclear weapons and Rune-empowered Mages. To Damien’s Sight, the runes that covered them spoke of near-invulnerability, of drawing the power of the roots of the stone to stand against any threat.

  Thankfully, they had the access codes.

  “Wait here,” he ordered the Guards. “We have an hour before we’re scheduled to be anywhere. We’ll probably need all of that time.”

  “Of course, Lord Regent.”

  The title still left Damien shivering—and that was before he thought about what it meant. Who had died for him to be Lord Regent.

  That reminder carried him into the throne room with unshed tears burning his eyes.

  “Damien?” Kiera asked as the blast doors slid shut behind them.

  “Every time someone uses the title, I am reminded of what happened,” he admitted. “I’m sorry. I know it’s worse for you.”

  She exhaled a long sigh as her own eyes glistened in the dim light. Shaking herself, she looked around the cavern.

  “I was expecting more,” she noted. “More lights, if nothing else.”

  Damien chuckled and gestured to the PC on her wrist.

  “We both have the access codes for the room’s systems,” he told her. “But you have an easier time with a computer right now than me.”

  Between magic and an operating system specially designed for accessibility, Damien could use his wrist computer. It was just a slower process than he’d like, and there was no point in pretending he wasn’t injured when they were alone.

  The lights slowly came up around them and the two of them moved forward, studying every line and curve of the room as they did.

  “It’s an exact duplicate of the Mountain at one-thousandth scale, isn’t it?” Kiera asked.

  “I hadn’t realized, but I think you’re right,” Damien confirmed. The circular room rose to an inverse-domed ceiling twenty-some meters above them. He couldn’t be certain without a comparison, but Kiera was probably right.

  It would make sense.

  “Look, is that it?” she was pointing.

  Damien had missed the web of silver strands tracing through the smooth stone walls and into the air, but he didn’t miss the silver orb that the young Queen was pointing at. It was at least three meters across, suspended in the middle of the room and out of reach of either of them.

  Directly beneath it was the throne. It wasn’t anything impressive. Even the Rune Wrights had been hesitant to change anything in this space, so the throne remained the same plain stone seat it had always been.

  As they approached, Damien could see where the chair had once mounted metal buckles and leather straps. The children strapped into the seat hadn’t been there voluntarily. Much of the non-power-generating aspects of Olympus Mons had been built for Project Olympus.

  It might be a palace now, but it had been built as a prison and a slaughterhouse. Thousands of children had been born there, raised until they were thirteen, and then tested in this room. If they didn’t show enough magic to meet the standard the Eugenicists had been looking for, well…the slopes of Olympus Mons had entire sections marked off as memorials, full of unmarked graves for children only ever given numbers.

  “You can feel it, can’t you?” Kiera said softly. “The weight of blood and death in here.”

  “I think that’s just that we know what was done here, what Project Olympus was about,” Damien countered. “I don’t think that’s the amplifier.”

  “Where is the amplifier?” she asked. “I was expecting runes like a simulacrum—probably on the chair.”

  He hadn’t even thought of that—or of the obvious problem if the amplifier did need a Jump Mage’s interface runes.

  “Desmond the First used it without runes of any kind,” Damien pointed out. “I don’t think it’s an interface thing. I’m not sure we’ll even see runes as we understand them. If a Rune Wright can use this amplifier, then…”

  He took a seat on the stone chair and reached into his Sight.

  He always had some awareness of the magic around him, in a way he’d assumed most Mages shared until he’d learned otherwise. He could feel the eddies of power and energy that flowed through the Mountain, of the magic and runes carved into and drawing on the living stone, but to truly read magic, he needed to focus.

  Opening his Sight fully inside that space was stunning. He had to close his eyes after less than a second, exhaling heavily.

  “Be careful with your Sight,” he murmured to Kiera, keeping his eyes closed. “Your general feel for magic is u
nderestimating the power in here.”

  “That’s so weird,” the Mage-Queen said. “Normally, I know how much magic is around me. I thought it felt…weak here.”

  “This is different.”

  Damien opened his eyes again and looked into chaos. Every strand of silver wire supporting the globe glittered with power. Every line of silver inlay in the walls, natural or artificial, gleamed at him.

  There was more than just the physical present. Studying the trails of power, he could see that many of them weren’t even connected to a rune. Damien had never seen a permanent construct without an anchor before, but there it was. At least a third of the flow of power in the room ran through the air.

  “The runes on the walls are Martian Runic,” Kiera noted. “Don’t worry,” she continued after a moment, “I’m keeping my Sight under control. I need you to link in and show me how, just in case the Runes are more important than we thought.”

  He followed her pointing hand and nodded. He’d been so stunned by the awe-inspiring display of power he was sitting amidst that he hadn’t been looking for patterns yet.

  The key part of what Kiera was observing was that most of the amplifier wasn’t Martian Runic, the categorized and formalized language of magical constructs. That language was complicated enough, with seventy-six characters and fourteen different connectors.

  The outer shell of the room was carved in those runes, the same ones found in any human spaceship and, memorably, in one alien ruin. In fact…

  “The runes on the walls are the standard amplifier matrix,” Damien told Kiera. “Everything inside is…the simulacrum? Except not.”

  The first Mage-King had copied the runes from the outer wall to create humanity’s amplifier matrix, the key to the stars and the most powerful weapon of the Royal Martian Navy. But none of the Mage-Kings had ever attempted to copy the construct inside the room, and as Damien studied it, he knew why.

  “It’s a Rune of Power,” he said softly. “Except not for a human. Not for a living being at all.”

  “I don’t understand, Damien,” Kiera told him.

  His fingers didn’t bend well yet, but he could still gesture with his hands. Channeling powering through them, he drew a pattern in the air. Kiera could see the glowing runes as they linked his flesh into the magic around them.

  “The amplifier is immense,” he said distractedly as he continued to weave the growing construct of pure magic around himself. He was only vaguely sure what he was doing, operating entirely on instinct.

  “The sheer scale of Olympus Mons means that the amplifier we see here is layered inside two more.” He wasn’t even sure how he knew that from there, but he did. Even that wasn’t supposed to be possible. “That alone would give someone wielding it nine times the power of a regular amplifier.

  “But this…this chamber is what makes it something more. What allowed children with no magical gift to be tested. Just sitting here and focusing on the silver would be enough to get some result…but a Rune Wright could feel the truth of it.”

  “Which is?” Kiera asked. “I can see what you’re doing, but even I’m only following half of it.”

  “I’m making an interface rune,” he said softly. “To link into the main runes here.” He shook his head, even that gesture part of the forging of the rune.

  “From here, we are linked to the molten heart of Mars,” he continued. “Everything around us is an amplifier, Kiera, but this room is both an interface and a Rune of Power for Mars itself.”

  He took a moment to study the construct he’d been building, assessing its flow of magic compared to the structure around him. Then he made the final adjustment, slipping the entire artifice of magic up a dozen centimeters and slotting it into the runes above him.

  There was a mental click and the universe changed.

  The first visible sign of something changing was that the silver sphere exploded. One moment, a solid sphere of silver three meters across was suspended above their heads. The next it was gone, a flash of magic turning the sphere into untold billions of liquid silver drops.

  Hundreds of tons of silver were liquefied in an instant, but there was no heat in the space. Just an overwhelming sense of power as the Olympus Amplifier woke up.

  Damien was linked, bound to the power of the construct he’d just activated. His own interface runes were bound to his power instead of his flesh, resulting in a bond even more intimate than a Jump Mage’s link with a starship.

  A moment’s focus brought up the “default view” of the simulacrum, the one Desmond the Third had usually shown him. The liquid silver coalesced into a scale model of the inner solar system, even the planets only a few centimeters across on a scale that filled a room several hundred meters across.

  “Whoa.”

  This version of the simulacrum wasn’t visually useful except…

  “Kiera, there’s supposed to be a computer program that links to this,” he said aloud. “Can you—”

  “Got it.”

  Concealed hologram projectors around the room lit up, and icons materialized across the simulacrum. Presumably, cameras and scanners were feeding the current state of the simulacrum to the computer, allowing it to match the icons to the right locations.

  “Lightspeed delay on the computer system data but not the simulacrum itself,” Damien said softly. He stood and walked over to a set of icons. A gesture changed the simulacrum, zooming it in on a task group of RMN cruisers patrolling the asteroid belt.

  The holograms happily told him the names of both cruisers and all four destroyer escorts. Older ships, as expected. Most of the new ships in the Royal Martian Navy were with Jane Alexander.

  “What can you do from here?” Kiera asked, fascinated.

  “Anything,” Damien said softly. “And the amplification factor…my god. I could bring that entire task group back to Mars with the effort it takes to teleport my cat down from my desk.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Testing that would really screw with them, wouldn’t it?” Kiera asked in a disappointed voice.

  “Yes,” Damien agreed. “But…I can see how Desmond the First managed to accelerate the terraforming of Mars. I’m not sure what isn’t possible with this.”

  “My dad spent at least an hour every day in here,” she said, her voice suddenly very quiet and sad. “He said even that hour meant he needed to spend at least twice that dealing with paperwork and similar crap to remind himself that he was mortal.

  “It was too easy to forget that in here.”

  “I could see that.” Damien pulled the simulacrum view back out from the squadron, watching as the computer system followed his control of the artifact. “But I also see why only a Rune Wright can use this. You need to be able to see the magic of the interface and build your own key.

  “My key wouldn’t work for you, and Desmond’s wouldn’t have worked for me. Much like a Rune of Power but even more unique.”

  He exhaled a long sigh and released the interface. It took the silver a few seconds longer to re-form into the ball than it had taken to explode out, but it was still impossibly fast. He could see tears in Kiera’s eyes in the reflection from the sphere and stepped over to her.

  “All of this and he died to a fucking accident,” she snapped, the last two words a scream that echoed around the chamber. “He could have remade worlds, but he couldn’t keep himself alive.”

  “That’s where we all fall down in the end,” Damien said softly. “For all the power we might wield, we are only human. We are mortal.”

  “I don’t want him to be!”

  Power flashed through the room, uncontrolled force as Kiera unthinkingly lashed out. The amplifier was basically immune to human tantrums. Damien was more vulnerable, but he’d been half-expecting this since he arrived.

  “Neither do I,” he told her calmly, his power wrapping around hers to safely contain her. He fed his own grief into that shield, keeping both of them—and everything else nearby—safe.
>
  “What do you fucking know?” she snapped, a spike of force trying to fling him away. “I just lost everybody.”

  “I was a year younger than you are now,” Damien said coldly, trying not to be angry at her. He doubted she’d ever read his formal file, and it wasn’t like he talked about his family.

  “A car accident. Drunk driver who’d hot-wired the security systems. My siblings were two and four, both in safety seats in the back of my parents’ car. My parents were in front.

  “I was at a boarding school for Mages. I didn’t find out about the accident for seven hours, not that it mattered. My entire family died before emergency services were even on the scene.”

  The tsunami of power died down as multiple forms of grief warred across Kiera’s face.

  “I didn’t know,” she whispered.

  “You weren’t supposed to,” he told her, stepping into her personal space and opening his arms. She curled into him like the lost child she was and started sobbing into his shoulder. “It hurts to talk about it, even now. But I know what you’re feeling, Kiera, even more than just because I lost them both too.

  “What you’re feeling is right,” he said softly. “You’re not just allowed to feel like this; you should.”

  He chuckled.

  “Throwing magic at people because of it is a little less okay,” he reminded her, “but I understand where you are and what you’re dealing with. Not everyone will. Some might if you weren’t the Mage-Queen of Mars. Others will think that duty must subsume all.”

  “But duty must overcome,” she replied through her tears. “We can’t—”

  “We can grieve,” Damien interrupted her. “We must grieve. And then we put on the uniform, be it a business suit or a vac-suit, and we go to work. Because duty must overcome,” he echoed back, “but that doesn’t mean we aren’t human behind the uniform.”

  “I just want my dad back,” she whispered. “And Des and…Roger and Han and Xi and…”

  She disintegrated into tears before she finished naming the Royal Guards who’d died on the shuttle.