NOVA VIRCONIUM

HELLAS PLANITIA, MARS

DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA

AUGUST 6, 1988

"Mistis."

Yolande Ingolfsson looked up briefly as the serf woman set the cup and saucer on her desk, then murmured an abstracted, "Thank you, Marya," as she turned her attention back to the terminal's monitor. One hand brought the ceramic cup to her lips and she took a moment to savor it. Kenya Mountain Best, diluted with a quarter of hot cream and a tenth of Thieuniskraal. Warmth and richness flowed over her tongue, with a hint of bite at the back of her mouth and down her throat.

Yolande sighed as she regretfully set the cup back onto its saucer, moodily looking over at the small pile data-plaques set nearby. Promotion had come fast since her unqualified success with the Telmark IV flotilla five years before. Inwardly she smiled savagely at the memory. She'd extracted a small amount of payback from the Yankees for a very large debt.

Putting those Yankee specialists under the Yoke and winning the engagement against pursuing Alliance cruisers afterward had secured a goodly amount of glory and prestige, while the money from the comet she'd helped capture for mining had made her one of the more wealthy Citizens in the whole Domination. Promotion had come swiftly and Yolande had climbed the ranks steadily until she found herself sitting at this very desk, Commandant-Governor of Mars. Of course, she thought a bit self-deprecatingly, it isn't a very big planet, and there aren't many people on it yet.

She turned her attention back to the terminal, the corners of her mouth turning down as she looked over the latest readings from some of the satellites in orbit. She'd arrived just four months ago, and Yolande had inherited one big mystery from her predecessor. Whenever satellites or ships passed over the south polar region of Promethei Planum, they detected intermittent magnetic field shifts and other strange phenomena. The whole area had gotten a bit of a 'Bermuda Triangle' reputation among the colonists and the space force.

"Freya, what a headache," she muttered under her breath as she pulled the palm-sized synthetic rectangle from the receptor and set it down on the much smaller pile of data-plaques on the other side of her desk. Promethei Planum had been a mystery ever since they'd started regularly monitoring Mars after the establishment of Nova Virconium back in '70, prospecting for ore and water ice deposits. It wasn't about to start unraveling its secrets just because one Yolande Ingolfsson was sitting in the planetary-governor's office.

She slid another plaque into the terminal's receptacle and got back to work. Space force deployments. Quarterly report on mining output - up from the last report, unsurprisingly. The latest proposals for the long-term project of terraforming Mars. It was several hours before Yolande finally set the last plaque onto the 'out' pile and stretched her arms over her head, twisting from side to side to work some of the kinks out of her lower back. "Mm, get a masseuse to work 'em out," she murmured and downed the rest of her coffee as she stood up.

Bing. The phone on her desk. The Draka shot a resentful glare at it. Bing. Bing. "The things I do for the Race," she sighed as she slowly sat back down and keyed the touchplate. A young face appeared on the screen, blue eyes staring out of an angular, ruggedly handsome face with short cropped black hair and a diamond stud in one earlobe. He wore the uniform blacks of the military and nervously wet his lips as she appeared on his screen. A dew of sweat shone on his brow. Sweet mother Freya, I don't usually make them that nervous until better acquaintance, Yolande thought bemusedly.

When the silence stretched a moment longer than courtesy permitted, she decided to take the initiative. "Service to the State," she rapped out crisply.

"Glory to the Race," the young man answered automatically, and visibly gathered himself. "Centurion Harold McWhirter reportin' from Outpost XII, Chiliarch."

Yolande used the moment to took to lean back in her chair to wrack her brain. Right, in the far southern hemisphere at Fafnir Crater. She nodded, partly to herself and also to encourage the young centurion to continue.

"A prospectin' team workin' nearby discovered a... structure. Underground." He licked his lips again and visibly wrestled himself back to calmness. Not that Yolande could blame him, despite the mastering of the Will being the mark of a Citizen of the Race.

"A structure?" she replied slowly. "What kind of structure?"

"Initial readings transmitted back from the lochos sent to the site show that it's large, Chiliarch." Another pause, and she could sense the thrumming excitement behind the younger man's outward facade. "Real large. Mo' like a complex, they say."

"Shitfire," Yolande whispered aloud, then blinked and shook her head. "I want confirmation on this, Centurion. If it's fo'thcoming, I want an entire tetrarchy sent out to secure it."

"Yes, Chiliarch," he rapped out, pounding his fist to his chest in salute.

"And Centurion?" The young man visibly paused on his way to hitting the disconnect and focused back on the screen. "You keep this quiet, y'hear?"

Yolande let a deep breath puff out as she slouched back in the chair, feeling like she'd just taken a surprise shot into the solar plexus as she stared at the blank screen. "Mistis?" She looked up to see the Yankee serf, Marya, standing at the door to her office, her usual blank expression betraying a hint of surprise at the sight of the usually controlled Draka in such a position. "Is... something wrong?"

"Never you mind," Yolande said, sitting up setting her folded hands on the desk top. "Get me another coffee, I got a lot more work ahead of me." Marya nodded, confusion evident on her face, and turned to head back out.

After the sound of the serf's footsteps receded, Yolande indulged herself in a short laugh that was part hysterical. "An underground structure. On Mars." Books like that had started to go out of style during her teens as both the Domination and the Alliance made their way into solar system and started to disprove many of the fanciful ideas of authors from earlier years. Suddenly everything was up in the air again.

After a pause for thought, she bared her teeth in what wasn't a grin. "And it's ours." The Domination had always lagged behind the Yankees in certain technologies. If even part of what her fevered imagination conjured up was actually in that structure... Glory to the Race, she thought. Glory to the Race.