Mooren managed to somehow get straighter as she stood in front of Roslyn’s desk. She was at least five years older than Roslyn, the Lieutenant Commander judged, and she seemed somewhat taken aback by Roslyn’s certainty.
“We are Marines, sir,” Mooren told her. “We do the job. Sometimes, that means we never talk about the job again. Whatever you need, whatever we’re ordered.”
“All right. I don’t want to have to repeat myself, so why don’t you arrange for your squad to meet me in a secure conference room?” Roslyn suggested. “No one even aboard Huntress is to know about this.”
“I will make it happen, sir,” Mooren assured her. “No one will ever know we were gone.”
9
“Settle it down, Marines,” Mooren barked as Roslyn stepped into the room.
The Mage managed not to visibly shake her head as she realized what Mooren had picked as a “secure conference room.” She was almost certainly correct that the security around the Marines’ ready room was as good as any secure conference room, but the age-old space of lockers and benches certainly didn’t feel professional.
Still, the ten Marines in the room were on the benches and paying attention within seconds of the Sergeant’s order, and Roslyn surveyed them calmly, hopefully concealing her own momentary discomfort.
At least half of the squad was older than she was, and all of them were hardened veterans of assault operations in the war against the Republic. She’d taken some time to review their records before this meeting, and she’d been impressed.
“All right, people,” she said to them. “Major Dickens apparently assigned you to me because you’re the best he has. Are you going to live up to that?”
“Oorah,” ten voices echoed back at her, and she had to grin at their enthusiasm.
“Good. You’re going to be living in my back pocket for the next few days at least as I investigate the situation on Sorprendidas,” she told them. “Since we’re going into an unknown threat environment, I want to make sure you know almost as much as I do about the situation. Hence, this.”
She waved around.
“What’s the threat, sir?” one of the older Marines asked. “We can prep for anything.”
“Threat is unknown,” Roslyn repeated. “But it will likely involve either or both of Mage war criminals and Republic covert-ops Augments.”
The room suddenly silenced and she realized she had everyone’s attention.
“Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?” she asked. “For those of you who missed it, the inventor of the Prometheus Interface was a Mage named Dr. Samuel Finley. Prince-Regent Montgomery killed him—before he was Prince-Regent, obviously.
“But there were other Mages involved in the Prometheus Project. We’ve identified twenty-six and we’ve only brought eleven to justice,” Roslyn told the Marines. “That’s fifteen war criminals, Mages who voluntarily helped the Republic murder thousands of other Mages and extract their brains to fuel their warships.”
Now the silence was angry.
“After the war, the Mountain sent out imagery of every one of those Mages we had to every asset we had in the former Republic,” she continued. “The Red List, it’s called. An MISS long-term plant here in Sorprendidas identified Finley as a recurring visitor and even flagged several businesses that he was involved in.
“Then that agent went silent. A second agent sent to follow up was killed in a car crash. Two more sent to follow up on that have also gone silent. Four MISS covert operatives—primarily spies but still expected to handle themselves—are missing. Presumed dead.”
“And you think they found something?” another Marine asked.
“I’m not sure they did,” Roslyn admitted. “I have all of their reports prior to them going dark, and there’s no smoking gun in there. But I think they each got close enough that someone decided not to take the risk.
“That tells me there’s something active here, not just a few businesses that took investment from the worst war criminal of the last few centuries,” she told them. “The Prince-Regent thinks there’s a secret laboratory somewhere on Sorprendidas—and if there’s a rogue Prometheus lab, it likely has rogue Prometheus Mages.
“We want to find the Mages. Find the lab. Capture the Mages. Shut down the lab. And not die doing it.”
The room was silent for longer than Roslyn expected.
“We’re not really equipped for fighting Mages, sir,” Mooren finally admitted. “Not without full exosuit combat armor, anyway.”
“You have a blank check from Captain Daalman for any gear you need that Song of the Huntress carries,” Roslyn replied. “We have a shuttle at our disposal until the mission is over. We load it with exosuits and everything else you can think of.
“I don’t know what we’re going to be facing, so I suggest we make certain we can take on anything.” She spread her hands. “I can take on most Mages,” she admitted.
Roslyn Chambers was a Mage by Blood, able to trace her bloodline to the survivors of Project Olympus, the victims of Mars’s pre-Mage-King Eugenicist rulers. Even for a Mage by Blood, she was powerful.
There were few Mages she wouldn’t be confident in her ability to handle. Assuming a fair playing field or one tilted in her favor, at least—she’d been tranquilized and captured by a Mage traitor once, after all.
“Can I make an argument for an assault shuttle?” Mooren suggested. “Can we trust local backup?”
“To a point,” Roslyn said. “An assault shuttle is too much for theoretically friendly landings on a Protectorate world, Sergeant. And while I suspect our target has at least partially co-opted local authority, the government of Sorprendidas would probably be just as horrified to discover a secret Prometheus lab as we are.”
She shook her head.
“We will cooperate with the local authorities, but we are the RMN and RMMC,” she told them. “We have the authority and the orders to investigate and handle this situation. We will do so covertly and quietly while trying not to draw attention to ourselves…for as long as we can.”
“And then we
