“A twelve-month involuntary medical leave, Commander, is the final step before a medical discharge,” she admitted. “If things have progressed to this level of severity, the loss of Duke of Magnificence may have also cost the RMN one of our better cruiser Captains.

  “And cost you that coach and mentor.”

  Roslyn nodded slowly. The idea of having Cemal Hesenov in her corner for the next decade of her career would have been extremely reassuring. She was worried now about whether or not she was actually ready to be a starship executive officer. Her actions of the last few months left her judgment entirely too in question, in her opinion.

  “I am aware, Chambers, that you have no shortage of advocates and willing mentors,” Eriksen said calmly. “But none of those assorted Admirals and politicians are recent warship Captains, and there is no substitute for being supported in a job by someone who recently did the same one.”

  There was a long silence. Roslyn wasn’t sure what to say. She wasn’t selfish enough to be more concerned about her career than Hesenov’s health.

  Instead, she looked past the Admiral at the wallscreen window, taking in the fleet base and the ships in the refit yards.

  “I understand, sir,” she finally said. “I…I am prepared to serve however the Protectorate needs.”

  That seemed safe enough, but it earned her a sharp cough of laughter from Eriksen.

  “Be careful with that sentiment, Chambers,” the older woman told her. “It can get you in all kinds of trouble if you don’t know what I’m waiting to catch you with.”

  “Sir?”

  “The first piece of medical news I received yesterday was the one that resulted in this appointment,” Eriksen said. “Mage-Captain Hesenov’s medical leave is unfortunate, in this context, as I was expecting you to have his mentorship for this next stage in your career.”

  Roslyn was lost again. What next stage?

  Vice Admiral Eriksen entered a series of commands on a concealed panel on her desk, and the wallscreen adjusted, zooming in on a specific refit slip.

  “Mage-Commander Aswathi Schmidt is less decorated than you are,” she noted. “Most officers are.”

  Used to hearing that as Roslyn was, it was still embarrassing to hear. The Ruby Medal of Valor, the marker of receiving two of the Protectorate’s highest honor, was held by only four living people.

  It tended to be awarded posthumously to people who’d earned the first Medal of Valor while alive. Heroism wasn’t an indicator for long life expectancy, after all.

  Roslyn wasn’t, on the other hand, sure who Mage-Commander Aswathi Schmidt was or what that had to do with the old Honor-class destroyer in the refit slip.

  “Schmidt is senior to you by three years in grade and has held destroyer command for a year,” the Admiral continued. “If you were curious as to when you were likely to be seeing a destroyer command under regular circumstances.”

  That still felt potentially too soon to Roslyn, with her current fears. Two to three years of being someone else’s executive officer might leave her feeling qualified to command a destroyer. Maybe.

  Though not every Mage-Commander commanded a destroyer on their way up. Destroyer command was split relatively evenly between senior Mage-Commanders who’d impressed their superiors and junior Mage-Captains.

  “Unfortunately for everyone, Aswathi Schmidt is currently in the Corinthian Fleet Base Hospital,” Eriksen told Roslyn. “The details aren’t super relevant, but he’s dealing with an unexpected outbreak of an extremely aggressive cancer. The doctors are confident they can handle it, but he, like Mage-Captain Hesenov, is now on involuntary medical leave for an unknown period.

  “Which means I have a destroyer about to leave her refit slip with no commanding officer,” Admiral Teodora Eriksen told Roslyn, who finally caught up to what was going on and stared at the ship on the screen in pure shock.

  “Her executive officer is a competent young man, but Mage-Lieutenant Commander Rohit Mac Thaidhg has never seen combat and generally lacks the seasoning to be jumped to Mage-Commander and take over Voice of the Forgotten.

  “You, on the other hand, have seen more combat than I have and have collected the medals to prove your seasoning.”

  Roslyn forced her emotions under control. It would not help her case, in any direction, if she broke down into a gibbering panic fit in the Admiral’s office. The Royal Martian Navy was good enough about mental health that a panic attack probably wouldn’t hurt her long-term career—but she’d be joining Hesenov and Schmidt on involuntary medical leave!

  “So, Mage-Commander Chambers,” the Admiral said quietly. “Voice of the Forgotten is yours if you want her.

  “Make no mistake: she’s an Honor-class ship. Pre-War-built.” Eriksen chuckled. “I’d have to check, but I think she’s older than you are. We’re decommissioning half the class, and Voice missed the cutoff by six days.

  “That makes her one of the oldest warships in the Royal Martian Navy, but our yards have done a heavy refit on her. She doesn’t have the defensive skirt of the new ships or even the extra defensive turrets of the wartime escort destroyers.

  “But she’s been refitted for the new missile launchers and she carries a Link. All of her electronics, rune matrices and hardware have been updated. Her hull is old, but her systems are brand-new. That might be a surprise to anyone who assumes they’re running into an obsolete pre-War ship.”

  Roslyn nodded, trying to both take in the data she was being given and calm the part of her brain that wanted to run around in circles.

  She wasn’t ready for warship command. She knew how fragile her judgment was, how risky the promotions that had come after each damned “act of heroism” had become in the aggregate. If Schmidt had three years of seniority on her, then he was at least six years older than her, since Roslyn had been battlefield-commissioned after her first year in the Academy.

  Looking at a million-ton warship, she felt very young and very inexperienced…but she knew one thing. One additional factor that she could not forget.

  The Royal Martian Navy had a general tradition with officers who refused promotion or greater responsibility. The principle was very simple: if an officer felt they weren’t capable of handling more responsibility, it wasn’t the Navy’s job to argue with them.

  The offer wouldn’t be repeated. Not for years, at least, if ever. Especially the offer of warship command, where there were easily hundreds of Mage-Commanders who would leap at the chance being presented to Roslyn.

  “So, Mage-Commander Chambers,” Eriksen said into the silence that Roslyn suddenly realized had gone far too long. “Are you prepared to assume command of one of Her Majesty’s destroyers and take on the burden of Her Protectorate?”

  Prepared? No. Willing…Roslyn was surprised by the answer her brain instantly threw up to that internal question.

  “Yes, sir,” she told Admiral Eriksen. “As I said…I will serve however the Protectorate needs.”

  20

  Another report on the deep analysis of the data from a site that had been supposed to receive a Link terminal was on Kelly LaMonte’s monitor. She’d read the summary and was now just skimming the rest of the report.

  There was no point in doing more. It was another dead end. The twenty-third such dead end, and they’d only had seventeen locations to start. Six more possibilities had turned up during their search, and Condesa’s police had still been willing enough to listen at that point.

  Kelly suspected that Director Radic would be less cooperative now. Twenty-three blanks had to leave the Director wondering if her Martian counterparts had a damn clue what they were doing.

  Which was fair. Kelly was starting to wonder if she had a damn clue what she was doing. Every piece of information she had said that the Link terminals had been coming to Condesa and to those delivery locations.

  But nobody on the entire damn planet had a clue what she was talking about—and their company records agreed with them.

  “Still beating your head against a wall?” Xi Wu asked from her office door.

  “I suspect beating my head against a wall would be more productive,” Kelly admitted with a long sigh. “I’m considering dyeing my hair just to feel like I’ve achieved something.”

  “Also because you dye your hair every two weeks?” her wife asked.

  “Also because I dye my hair every two weeks,” Kelly said with a chuckle. She closed the screen and leaned back in her chair—conveniently at about the right height to put her head on Xi’s breasts.

  “We know the terminals never reached here,” Xi Wu said, her hands settling on Kelly’s shoulders and starting to gently massage the muscles there. “It’s looking more and more like they were never supposed to.”

  “Which, of course, stinks,” Kelly replied. She adjusted to let Xi dig more deeply into her shoulder muscles. She’d have to repay this later, but she could live with that.

  “Because the pirate was ex-Republic,” Xi concluded.

  “Yeah. That doesn’t fit Mike’s X pattern,” she said. “The rest of this…does. Don’t tell him I said that.”

  “Eh, I started thinking he had a point when the Sorprendidas data went astray,” her wife admitted. “It’s just fun to prod him about being a conspiracy theorist. He’s right when he says that’s part of our job, though.”

  “Pretty much. But an ex-Republic pirate doesn’t fit with X,” Kelly repeated. “I could see a regular pirate. That’s half what I was expecting, to be honest. The Benjamin, though…even treating X as a variable to be solved, there’s still a pattern you can start to see.

  “And that pattern doesn’t fit X having a great deal of reach in the Republic during the Secession,” she said. “I’d be less surprised by rogue Militia or even rogue Navy. So…”

  “So?” Xi echoed, her fingers finding a knot and drilling in a way that took Kelly’s breath away.

  Inhaling and recovering her breath as the knot released, Kelly smiled as her mental knot did the same.

  “So, we got distracted by the cruiser, but if the cruiser isn’t part of X, the Links have gone astray from everyone’s perspective,” she noted. “In any case, it’s clear they were never going to arrive at the official destinations.

  “Which means they were going to go somewhere else and that they were going to be redirected.” She shook her head. “I think they were going to be redirected here, but I don’t think the local judges are going to sign off on a fishing expedition into the files of every transshipment hub in the system.”

  “And rightly so,” Xi Wu pointed out. “That’s a hell of an invasion of privacy for a suspicion, Captain-my-love.”

  “I know,” Kelly agreed. “We can quietly poke and ask questions, so long as we don’t run into needing-a-warrant territory, and that’s a good place for us to start. But…”

  “But?” Xi asked. “Condesa isn’t going to be our key, is it?”

  “You read my mind, as usual,” Kelly told her Mage wife with a smile. “The key, I think, is that if the pirate isn’t associated with X, they found themselves with a bunch of terminals they didn’t necessarily have the codes or knowledge to use.”

  “So, they’d have sold them…”

  “Exactly.” Kelly’s smile turned predatory. “And even if we can’t find the closed network, we can definitely find the three Links on the civilian net that were bought by the Condesa government.”

  Kelly knew it would take days to track down anything.

  There were two calls that went out. The first was to the MISS Link Communications Security team, the group of data analysts and cyberwarfare specialists tasked with making sure that the Protectorate’s FTL communications remained absolutely secure.

  They were the ones with the codes and software to use the Link network itself to track the lost terminals that were attached to the main Link network. Since which network a terminal was attached to was physically part of the hardware, it couldn’t be changed or jammed.

  In theory, that meant the LCS team could track a Link anywhere across the galaxy. In practice, it didn’t take much effort to prevent a Link from knowing where it was. The LCS team could force the terminal to tell them everything it knew, but if it wasn’t connected to a system that could tell it where it was, it couldn’t give them that data.

  If the Benjamin that had taken the Links was still crewed by Republic officers and spacers, they’d know both how to do that and that it was necessary. The LCS team had a decent chance of finding the civilian Links if a mistake was made—but that mistake had to be made.

  The second call she put out was to all MISS surveillance outposts. The twenty missing Links all had specific radiation codes and identification sequences, a security measure that Republic Links had not had. There was a decent chance that long-range beacon had gone undetected, even by ex-RIN spacers.

  It wasn’t perfect, but there was a chance that the MISS outposts scattered through the Protectorate might pick up the Links coming through their systems and be able to pass that information on to Kelly.

  That would give her another place to look—and an idea of where the pirate from Condesa was off-loading her loot.

  The first ping came less than an hour after she’d gone to bed—barely six after sending out the call.

  “Captain, we’ve got a direct live-com request from MISS Mercedes,” Trixie Buday, Rhapsody in Purple’s com officer, told her once she’d woken up. “The agent is asking to speak with you.”

  Presumably not by name. Even though the MISS Link network was entirely separate from anyone else’s communications, they still kept most inter-system communications by code names and ranks.

  “I’ll be right there,” she promised.

  It took her less than sixty seconds to dress and run a brush through her slowly fading pink hair. Modern detangler sprays were fantastic things.

  Buday, a young blond woman that reminded Kelly of a younger version of herself, had a cup of coffee waiting for her when she entered the bridge several minutes after that.

  “Agent Tamarind is waiting patiently,” she told Kelly. “Should I connect to your office?”

  “Yes, please,” Kelly told the other woman. Rhapsody in Purple was not a warship, but the Captain’s office was still attached to the bridge.

  According to her wrist-comp, seven minutes had passed since Agent Tamarind had contacted them via the Link by the time Kelly took her seat in her office and accepted the call.

  “Agent Purple here,” she addressed the man on the screen. Both of them were noticeably fuzzy, just enough distortion to make recognizing the other person from the image almost impossible.

  The Martian Interstellar Security Service might be paranoid…but that was quite literally their job.

  “You sent out an all-stations alert to watch for certain Link radiological codes?” Tamarind asked without any preamble.

  “I did,” Kelly confirmed. She wasn’t required to explain why, though she could if Tamarind wanted to know.

  “Those codes aren’t on any of the official lists, so I hadn’t flagged them,” Tamarind told her. “Re-ran the analysis from the stealth-net take, though, and confirmed it.

  “Your list of twenty? All of them have been in the Mercedes System. I’m still running the analysis on exactly where in the system,” he admitted. “But they either were or are here, Agent Purple.

  “I figured you’d want to get moving if you were chasing them. No idea how long they’ll stay in Mercedes. This is an ex-Republic system, Purple.”

  “I know Mercedes of old,” Kelly confirmed. Rhapsody in Purple and her sisters had run scouting ops through every system of the Republic of Faith and Reason over the course of the war. She hadn’t been to Mercedes herself, but other scout ships had and she’d been briefed in detail.

  Mercedes was a MidWorld, with a decent home-based industrial capacity. Chunks of that had been turned to manufacturing gunships for the Republic Interstellar Navy, but they’d never quite been important enough to earn a visit from the RMN.

  The system had passed the war in relative calm and reintegrated into the Protectorate amicably. They were about as much of a “good news” story as the whole UnArcana Rebellions had.

  If Kelly’s Links were there, that good-news story would badly limit her resources.

  “How long is the analysis to locate the Links going to take?” she asked, checking the distance. Mercedes was forty-three light-years from Condesa. Nine days, give or take. Probably closer to ten, since she’d have to make nice with Director Radic on her way out.

  “A bit,” Tamarind admitted. “A few days, probably. Most of my data just gets dumped straight back to Mars, Agent Purple. There’s only three of us to cover an entire system. That’s what happens when things are quiet.”

  “I understand, Tamarind,” she told him. “We’ll be underway shortly. If you could reach out once the analysis is done, I’d appreciate it.”

  She smiled, hoping it came through the anonymizing distortion.

  “But we should be in Mercedes in ten to eleven days. We’ll touch base then on what the next steps look like.”

  “I look forward to it, Agent Purple,” Tamarind told her. “But step carefully. Mercedes may have come back into the fold amicably on the surface, but that doesn’t mean Mars is popular here. Everything is still a little confused, and I’m pretty sure the assorted crime syndicates are using that to their advantage.

  “Don’t mistake quiet for safe.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, Agent Tamarind. We’ll see you soon enough.”

  The channel closed and Kelly considered her options. Then she shrugged. The sooner they started moving, the sooner they might have answers.

  If she was awake, she might as well wake everyone else up.

  21

  The shuttle had been designed and modified for exactly the purpose it was currently being put to. Like the spacecraft Roslyn had surveyed the wreck of Duke of Magnificence from, large chunks of its outer hull had been magically transmuted to be transparent.

 

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