Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) (27 page)

Finally in a shuttle and descending toward Curiosity City, built on the edge of what had been the Gale Crater and was now the Gale Crater Sea, Damien began to plot his next moves. He was missing the assault shuttle he normally flew in, though, as the runabout had space for only four passengers.

Flying the shuttle himself allowed him to cram Amiri and three Secret Service Agents into the spacecraft, but that left Romanov and his company sorting out their own ride down to the surface. He would miss the extra firepower, though he was relatively sure he didn’t need it to interview a university professor.

With a few commands, he opened up a call to the Curiosity City University’s primary reception.

“Good afternoon,” he greeted the young man who appeared on the other end cheerfully. “This is Hand Damien Montgomery. I’d like to make an appointment to speak with Professor Periklis Raptis.”

The receptionist paused and took a moment to collect himself before replying.

“CCU is always ready to help His Majesty’s Hands,” he said brightly. “I can pull up Professor Raptis’s schedule and slot you in whenever he’s free. What time will you be arriving?”

“Roughly three PM local time,” Damien told him. “If possible, I’d like to meet with the Doctor immediately at that point; I have some questions with regards to his work, but my time, as you can imagine, is very limited.”

“Of course! Professor Raptis is free at three o’clock,” the receptionist told him eagerly. “I’ll add you to his calendar and let him know you’re on your way!”

“Thank you.”

That gave the Rune Scribe and potentially Keeper an hour to try and run away. Damien had a plan for
that,
too.

A second set of commands raised the Curiosity City branch of the Martian Investigation Service.

“This is MIS Curiosity City; how may I help you?” another cheerful young man, almost a clone of the one at CCU except actually in a uniform this time.

“Connect me to Director Agnes Wong, please,” Damien asked. “This is Hand Montgomery.”

The junior cop swallowed hard and obeyed with impressive alacrity, not even checking to see if the woman who ran the city’s branch was free or not.

“This is Wong,” an older woman with the dark brown skin and slanted eyes of a Martian native answered as the call connected. “This better be good.”

“This is Hand Montgomery, Director Wong,” Damien greeted her. “I’m going to need to commandeer your resources for a matter of Protectorate security.”

She nodded slowly with a grumbling cough.

“We are at the service of His Majesty’s Hands,” she told him.

“I have reason to believe that Professor Periklis Raptis of the Curiosity City University may shortly attempt to flee the University and, most likely, the city,” Damien replied. “If he does so, I need him intercepted and brought in. Alive.”

“
If
he flees?” she asked with an arched eyebrow.

“‘The wicked flee where no man pursueth’,” Damien quoted at her. “If the good doctor is innocent, he will happily meet with me and we will have a nice chat. If he is
not
, the last thing he’ll want is to be in the same room as a Hand.”

Wong chuckled.

“Sir,
I’m
pretty innocent, and I’d rather not be in the same room as a Hand,” she pointed out. “I have an aerial unit in the area I’m diverting. They’ll be in position in two minutes, sweeping for his car. I don’t have ground units anywhere nearby; if you want a ground sweep, I’ll need to secure local police.”

“Do it,” Damien ordered. “No details, only that there’s a warrant for Raptis’s arrest.” He dashed off said warrant as he spoke. If the Professor wasn’t a Keeper, if he’d only worked with Octavian for money or for some other acceptable reason, he could always void the warrant later.

“My lord, you haven’t given
me
more details than that,” Wong pointed out. “If he runs, we’ll catch him.”

“Thank you, Director. It’s nice to be able to rely on the MIS.”

He leaned back in the cockpit seat as he cut the channel, glancing at Amiri in the copilot’s chair.

“Do you trust them?” she asked.

“For this? Yeah,” he allowed. “We’ll have to see what Raptis does.”

The old rune scribe was the only lead he had. One way or another, Periklis Raptis would lead him to the Keepers.

#

The main entrance to Curiosity City University was marked by a statue of the rover the city was named for—an eleven-meter-tall heroic bronze of the robot that had confirmed water on Mars and allowed for the initial, very non-magical colonization of the red planet.

Even under the current time constraint, Damien couldn’t help but stop in the oval of soft grass and stare in awe at the sheer incongruity of it. One wheel surmounted a stylized mountain and the arm-like camera eye looked benevolently over the city named for it.

Smiling at both the absurdity and the absolute seriousness of the monument, Damien strode across the front courtyard to the glittering glass structure of the main administration building. Blinking against the reflected light, he stepped into the lobby and looked around for the young man from earlier.

He found him, along with several other young men and women who were probably students working on their summer break, behind an immense desk that ran across one wall.

The youth spotted him as he headed toward the desk and stepped out to meet him, eyeing the trailing quartet of suited Secret Service Agents uncomfortably.

“Hand Montgomery,” he greeted them. “Professor Raptis said he’d meet you in his office. Do you need a guide?”

“Please,” Damien told him. “Lead the way.”

He followed the student deeper into the building. Thankfully, once they were out of the main lobby, the glass was tinted on the inside, eliminating the reflection entirely. Raptis’s office was on end of the administration building closest to the Akintola Building, where the Runic Studies department held most of its classes.

Reaching the door, Damien stepped up and rapped sharply on it.

“Professor Raptis?” he asked through the door. “This is Hand Damien Montgomery.”

Only silence answered and the Hand mentally sighed. Gesturing for Amiri and the other agents to move up, he rapped harder on the door.

“Professor Raptis, please open the door,” he said gently. Mentally counting down from ten, he waited for someone to answer.

At zero, he made a chopping gesture with his hand and sliced the deadbolt in two. Shoving the door open, he pushed his way into the empty office before their guide even registered what he’d done.

The office was large but cluttered, with bookshelves covering every inch of the walls and several holo-displays set up in the middle of the room around the desk.

There were clear signs of a rapid exit, with entire bookshelves emptied onto the floor, presumably to extract a handful of papers or books. There
had
been a console built into the desk, but the entire electronic portion of the desk had been slagged with magical fire, as had a stack of papers and datachips pushed up against one of the holo-projectors.

“Well, it seems the Professor wasn’t interested in that interview,” Amiri said quietly.

“Indeed,” Damien said absently as he tapped the code for Director Wong’s office.

“Wong, this is Montgomery,” he greeted her. “Raptis has fled his office. Did any of your units pick him up?”

“Negative,” the MIS Director replied. “We have a hard lock on his car; it hasn’t gone anywhere. He
might
have slipped past the constables CCPD had in place, but they had a pretty good subtle net up a full half-hour ago. He didn’t leave on the ground or by air, my lord.”

“Damn,” the Hand murmured. “Search the room,” he ordered the agents. “If he had a getaway plan, let’s hope there’s some clue left here.”

“Is there anything MIS can do?” Wong asked.

“See if you can trace his movements,” he ordered. “There has to be
some
clue where he’s gone.”

“We’ll do that,” she promised. “I also have a team of
my
people, not CCPD, on their way to his house. I’ll let you know what we find.”

#

Julia stood back, watching the Hand with one eye as her team began to tear apart the cluttered office. He was getting better at hiding his emotions, but after a year, she could tell when he was frustrated. All of their leads right now ended there.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have given him any warning,” she told him.

“No. If he was a Keeper, he would never have consciously betrayed them,” the Hand replied distractedly. “We needed to know where he ran. We still do.”

Julia nodded, studying the room and looking for clues. She’d hunted men for money once, in darker corners of the galaxy than her mostly Sol-born Secret Service agents had ever seen. They were stripping bookshelves and moving them away from the wall, but…

The pattern for a secret exit wasn’t there. There wasn’t enough missing space in the walls.

“However he left, it wasn’t from here,” she said aloud, turning to their nervous-looking guide. “Kid, what’s your name?” she asked gently.

“Aaron,” he half-whispered. “Aaron Chun.”

He didn’t
look
like a Chun, but as she studied the youth, she picked out the key features of Mars’s classic mixed racial features despite the blond hair.

“This building has a service basement,” she told him. “Where’s the nearest access?”

“I…think it’s this way, ma’am,” he said quickly. “Follow me.”

“Keep searching,” she ordered her staff. “Damien?”

“Go,” he said softly. “I need to touch base with Romanov.”

She nodded to him and followed Chun out into the corridor.

“The maintenance accesses are locked,” he told her as he led the way. “I’m not sure if Raptis had a key.” He paused. “Um. I don’t have a key.”

Reaching the door, Amiri studied it. It was a perfectly normal-looking door, with a small
maintenance personnel only, keep out
sign above the lock.

“I don’t need one,” she told him, pulling out an auto-picking device and slapping it onto the lock. It wouldn’t work on anything particularly secure, but against the locks a maintenance door was secured with, it took less than a second.

The youth stared at her in surprise as she stepped through into the stairwell and descended into the depths of the building. She replaced the auto-picker with another tool she’d learned to use as a bounty hunter, and acquired an even better version of as a Secret Service team leader: a thermal scanner calibrated for footprints.

In the busy corridors above, it would have been useless. Here, where only a handful of maintenance staff came through in any given day, it showed the thirty-minute-old trail leading down clearly.

“You stay here,” she ordered the kid. The last thing she needed was a teenage anchor as she chased down their only lead to the Keepers.

Once the boy was out of sight, she drew her sidearm. Raptis
probably
wasn’t a threat—but he was a Mage and she wasn’t.

The single trail of footprints led her through the surprisingly clean mechanical rooms of the CCU administration building, crossing several other, older tracks as they went, until they finally ended at what looked like a plain concrete wall.

It was
possible
that the Rune Scribe had teleported through, but the footprints went
right
up to it. Running the thermal scanner over the wall suggested the presence of a door but gave no clue how to open it.

She sighed. Most likely, it was a radioed command code from the professor’s PC, which meant
they
were going to need explosives. By the time they got the tunnel open, their prey would be a long, long way away.

“What’s your status, Romanov?”

The Hand’s voice echoed in Denis’s helmet, sealed away from the noise of his people loading into the shuttle.

“I have half a platoon on a shuttle ready to go and another three squads loading,” he replied. “I can have eighty men on your position in twenty minutes. Ten if we have the clearance for a combat drop.”

Montgomery chuckled.

“I’m on a college campus, Mage-Captain,” he replied. “I don’t expect to need an assault landing. Do you have word from your people guarding Christoffsen?”

“I’ve checked in with Mage-Lieutenant Forbes,” Denis told his boss. “They’ve been allowing the academics back in, but it’s been quiet. No issues, though the Professor doesn’t seem to have found anything either.”

He’d also, from what Andrea Forbes had said, started trying to use the Marines as research assistants. Since RMMC Marines tended to be capable and
smart
, most of them seemed to be taking it in good humor as an educational opportunity. Since Mage-Lieutenant Forbes was even more capable and smarter than her Marines, she’d assigned the ones who
weren’t
taking it well as outer security.

“Julia is following her instincts from her bounty hunter days,” Montgomery told him. “I expect her to find something useful—at least, more useful than
I’m
finding in the man’s office—but I don’t expect to catch Professor Raptis at this point. We won’t need backup here beyond MIS data-crunching.

“I want
you
to reinforce Professor Christoffsen’s protection,” the Hand ordered. “I’m hoping he’s found something useful in the last few days, but I’m afraid that if he
has
, he’s a target. Drop that first squad ASAP. You’re not cleared for combat, but you
are
cleared to emergency-override Olympus Control. Understand?”

“Yes, my lord,” Denis replied, already thinking through the risks. The academics
probably
weren’t a threat, but if someone had the ability to change the bookings, they could have sneaked their own people in.

“We’ll keep the Professor safe,” he promised.

“Good. Let me know once you’re in place,” the Hand ordered.

Letting the channel close, Denis smiled and opened an intercom to the pilot. She’d be unlikely to complain about the change in plans—how often, after all, did a pilot get to override ground control?

#

Four shuttles dropped from the transfer station like homesick rocks, targeting the landing pad closest to the Archive chambers where Christoffsen was working. It wasn’t
quite
a combat landing—but it was enough that the civilian shuttles carrying the visiting Councilors’ staff were being cut off before they complained.

“This is
Olympus Mons
,” the controller snapped. “You can’t just charge down from orbit and tell us to ‘make it happen’!”

“Control, I’m operating on the direct authority of Hand Montgomery, who has identified a potential threat to the security of the Protectorate,” Romanov told the woman. After half a dozen go-arounds, the pilot had dumped Control on him and focused on flying. “I know we’re not exactly
used
to emergencies here, but the Hand
has
that authority and
I
will fulfill my orders.

“We’re not going to hit anyone on the way down, but I suggest you give my pilots as much of a safety zone as you can,” he continued gently. “My Marines
will
be on the ground in fifteen.”

“You can’t just land Marines at Olympus Mons.”

Denis smiled.

“I suggest you check with His Majesty whether or not he included that in his Hand’s authority,” he pointed out, “but either way, we’re landing.”

#

Denis led the way off of the shuttle onto the cooling tarmac and found a single soldier in red exosuit armor waiting for him. There was no insignia on the armor, but the Marine Mage-Captain came to attention and saluted the wearer anyway.

The Royal Guardsman might have a rank technically junior to his, but there were thousands of Marine Captains across the Protectorate. There were only two hundred Royal Guards—all of them fully trained Combat Mages, all of them Marines of at least ten years’ service, as many of them as possible combat veterans.

The Royal Guard was the mailed fist behind the silk glove of the Secret Service, and they never left Olympus Mons unless the Mage-King did.

“Guardsman Han,” the exosuit introduced herself. “Mage-Captain, what is the situation?”

“We have reason to believe that the conspiracy Montgomery is tracking has infiltrated the Mountain and may be moving on Professor Christoffsen to prevent him communicating his discoveries to the Hand.”

Han nodded once.

“We are not maintaining any particular surveillance on the Professor,” she noted. “I believe you have a platoon already guarding him?” A small hand gesture took in the
four
shuttles, each carrying an entire squad of Marines, behind Denis.

“And given the intelligence these people seem to have had all along, they’ll be ready for that,” he pointed out.

“I see your point,” Han allowed. “You don’t need my permission,” she continued, “but the Captain wanted to make sure
we
knew what was going on. Care for some company?”

A full company of Marines, three Combat Mages…versus an unknown level of threat from an organization that had commanded at least one Hand and a capital ship built to custom specifications.

“I would
love
some company, Guardsman.”

#

The Archives were much busier now than they had been when Denis had visited the Hand and Professor during their first phase of research. His platoon was scattered throughout the room, some on guard duty, some on more academic pursuits.

The Marines were in the majority in the room, but there were still at least thirty researchers of one stripe or another, digging through papers, hard storage, and the information databases. The arrival of a
new
group of Marines started to draw attention as his people made their way in.

The Archive was
huge
, and even filing over another eighty Marines in body armor and carrying carbines into the space didn’t noticeably crowd it. His people knew their brief and immediately moved to secure entrances and exits, unboxed cased heavy weapons and set up barricades even as the academics started to recoil away from them.

Ignoring the researchers—identifying if any of them where a threat was Kozel’s job—Denis crossed the old library cavern to where he spotted Forbes and Christoffsen still at the same set of consoles the Professor had started on weeks before.

“Good to see you, boss,” Forbes greeted him. “Did you have an overdue book?”

“Not this week,” he replied seriously. “Professor Christoffsen, please tell me you have something?”

“About a hundred and twenty Marines tramping around the library,” the old ex-Governor turned political aide said dryly. “And while I have learned quite a good deal about the origins of our enemy, I have learned nothing of immediate use.”

“Damn,” Denis muttered. “Montgomery was hoping,” he admitted. “Our biggest lead on Mars evaporated; he was hoping for context that could help us
find
something.”

“Context I can give you,” Christoffsen replied. “But I’m not sure knowing that the Keepers were created by direct order of the first Mage-King in Twenty-Two Sixty helps us
find
them. I can tell you they were a creation of the early days of the Protectorate, and that they took a
lot
of the Eugenicists’ files from this place,” he waved a hand around the Archives. “None of that is
useful
, however.”

“How were they funded?” Han asked. Denis glanced at the red-armored Guardsman.

“Sorry?” he asked.

“The Guard were quietly briefed on the Keepers after Montgomery returned,” she said softly. “They have a lot of resources, and they’re not being funded by the Protectorate—not without having co-opted an entire
army
of auditors, anyway.

“If the Mage-King wanted them kept secret, he would have provided them with some of kind of funding arrangement. What was it?”

“Follow the money,” Christoffsen said aloud. “I didn’t think of it—I looked to see if anyone was benefiting
today
but not how they were being
funded
. The ship was paid for out of Octavian’s personal funds, and I have ten of said auditors trying to see if anyone paid him
back
for it, but…”

He shook his head, turning to one of the Marines with him.

“Shelly, fetch me the second datachip from yesterday,” he told her. “It was a blue one, archival of land grants under the Terraforming Agency.”

“You already searched that, though,” she replied, though she went digging for it obediently regardless.

“I was looking for the wrong thing,” Christoffsen said sharply, his voice distressed. “I didn’t
think
—dammit, I
know the date the King created them
.”

The young Marine found the blue chip and the older man slotted it into the reader, warming up his data searches.

There was nothing Denis could do to help with that, so he glanced around the Archive, checking the status of his people. The defenses weren’t perfect—the room wasn’t particularly defensible—but unless he was facing Mages and exosuits, they would hold.

“There!
There!
” the Professor exclaimed. He threw a map up on the display and stabbed at a point on it.

“January fifteenth, two thousand two hundred and sixty,” he announced aloud. “
All
of the land grants that day were made in the Hellas Montes.”

“The Hellas Montes are a planetary park,” Forbes objected. “There’s nothing
there
except a few tourist traps.”

“And in the heart of the park, five hundred square kilometers that were granted to Caleb Octavian and then transferred into a holding company that has never done
anything
with them,” Christoffsen replied. “No roads enter the area. None of the tourist traps are near it. It’s in the middle of nowhere, where no one would ever go. Where else would you hide a secret library?”

“That’s a huge area,” Denis said quietly. “I’m not sure that’s enough.”

“It’s a starting point,” Christoffsen said. “I’m relaying to Montgomery now.”

A few keystrokes later and the old man leaned back, the excitement fading as he exhaled.

“Not as much of an answer as I hoped, but more than we had,” he said aloud. “It’s been transmitted. Down to the Hand now. If they wanted to stop me, Mage-Captain, they are too late now.”

And
then
the entire mountain trembled beneath their feet and the lights went out.