“Yes, sir,” Roslyn admitted. She hesitated, standing by the chair in front of Daalman’s standard-issue metal-and-plastic desk.
“Sit down, Chambers,” the Captain ordered. “Is this where I get to find out what the Prince-Regent put in your ear while you were having dinner with him?”
Roslyn took the seat, trying not to wince at the accuracy of her commander’s guess.
“How did you…” She trailed off helplessly, feeling very young.
“I figured the odds were sixty-forty that the Prince-Regent had wanted you for more than a social dinner,” Daalman noted. “And then you ask for a private meeting, which throws the odds to at least seventy-thirty.
“I’m guessing you have secret orders under the Mountain’s seal that you’re authorized to brief me on as you need assistance,” she continued. “I won’t pretend I like that, but I can work with it—and it makes sense to me that the Prince-Regent would lean on a young protégée like you.
“Tell me, did he introduce you to the Queen?”
Roslyn blinked. Now she was completely out of her depth.
“Yes?” she admitted.
“I figured,” Daalman said. “Kiera Alexander desperately needs a core cadre of officers and officials within spitting distance of her own age. Hell, Chambers, I’m almost as young to be a Mage-Captain as you are to be a Lieutenant Commander, and I’m over twice Her Majesty’s age.
“I’ve never met Montgomery, but from talking to people who have, I suspect he is very aware of the Mage-Queen’s lack of friends and allies of her own age group. I approve, strongly, of him helping her make those connections.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Roslyn admitted. “She’s…impressive. Clever, compassionate…but I had one dinner with her, sir.”
Daalman gestured at the painting of her with her husband and three children.
“And at one point, I’d had one dinner with Roger,” she pointed out. “Friendships have to start somewhere. Now, however.”
She leaned on her desk and studied Roslyn.
“I have impressed with my acuity and intuition, but you had a reason for scheduling this meeting, and it wasn’t for me to horrify you with what being the Prince-Regent’s protégée entails.
“What kind of mission have they saddled you with?”
Roslyn sighed.
“I’m to brief you as you need to know, sir,” she admitted. “That suggests against fully reading you in. But…I’ve been tasked to follow up on an investigation MISS was handling. Their agents have gone missing, so I need to catch up on what I can.
“That means I’ll need some time on the planet, away from the ship. But given that multiple MISS operatives are missing, presumed dead…I was hoping to borrow some Marines.”
“This is the ass end of fucking nowhere,” Daalman said bluntly. “Which I’m guessing is a great place to hide something. I’ll write the orders authorizing you to borrow a shuttle and travel to the surface as you need, but I have a requirement for lending you Marines, Lieutenant Commander. One I’m not going to budge on, no matter what your orders are.”
“Yes, sir?”
“If you’re taking Marines with you into this kind of mess, you brief them,” the Mage-Captain told her. “You can leave me with as little as I need to know, but the Marines at your back need to know everything. They can’t judge the risks otherwise—and you can trust Martian Marines to keep their mouths shut, too.”
“My orders say need to know, sir,” Roslyn noted. “I think that covers briefing my immediate escort.”
“Good.” Daalman waved her hand over her desk, activating a touchscreen interface linked to her wrist-comp. “I’ll touch base with Major Dickens and see which of his squads he’ll want to assign. He doesn’t need to know as much as I do, but he needs to know something.”
The Mage-Captain smiled coolly.
“Like I said, Chambers, I don’t like my officers having secret orders,” she reminded the junior woman. “But I understand the need and I understand the officer in question being you. You didn’t pick up multiple ranks of the Medal of Valor by being useless.”
“Sir,” Roslyn acknowledged.
“The Major will advise you of your team within a few hours,” Daalman told her. “You’ll have a shuttle and probably ten Marines. Try to bring them all back intact, Lieutenant Commander.”
“Of course, sir.”
Roslyn was busy pulling together the information she had from the MISS agents to identify a starting point when the admittance buzzer for her office went off. She concealed the data with a wave of her hand, then studied the door in silence for a moment.
She hadn’t heard anything from Captain Chiyembekezo Dickens—courtesy promoted to Major aboard a starship to avoid confusion with the ship’s Captain. She wasn’t entirely sure how the Marines would handle an assignment like this, though—she had limited experience with the Royal Martian Marine Corps.
“Enter,” she ordered.
The door slid open to reveal what she realized she’d been expecting: A Marine Sergeant in shipboard blues. The woman snapped to perfect attention as the door opened, giving Roslyn the preemptive salute both her rank and her Medal of Valor required.
“Mage-Lieutenant Commander Chambers, sir?” she asked in greeting.
“Come in, Sergeant,” Roslyn replied. “And you are?”
“Staff Sergeant Borislava Mooren,” the dark-haired Slavic woman introduced herself. “I lead First Squad of First Platoon for Major Dickens, and my squad has been assigned to you for a special project.”
“Come in, Sergeant,” Roslyn ordered. “I’m assuming the Major didn’t give you much to work from?”
“No, sir,” Mooren confirmed. “We’re assigned to your protection and discretion until ordered otherwise, with the understanding that everything you tell us and everything we do are completely classified.”
“That’s about all I’ve got, yeah,” Roslyn said with a chuckle. “This is locked down at some of the highest levels of bullshit, Sergeant. I have no idea how dangerous it’s going to get, but I can tell you that multiple very capable people are already dead.
“Once I brief you and
