Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars (3 page)

God - she’d probably want to
talk
to the rebels, instead of just dealing with them.

“I can’t drop rocks from orbit on my own,” she told Vaughn instead.

“Tell your staff I’ll add another zero to their special comp packages,” the Governor said flatly, and Cor shivered. If he was willing to throw
that
much money at it, he truly was scared of what would happen when the Hand arrived.

“You know I’m good for it,” Vaughn said after a moment of silence.

Cor also knew Vaughn wouldn’t go down without handing certain files to the Hand, so the money would have to be enough.

“Fine,” she said flatly, then cut the connection.

#

“Turns out I shouldn’t underestimate miners, Alpha,” Anthony told Lori over the com. “Or you, for that matter. Seriously? The Army ain’t coming?”

“Any of them that are left are busy pulling bodies from the wreckage,” Lori told him quietly. “The Scorpions?”

“Turns out one of the miners had built himself a trebuchet as a hobby,” Anthony replied. “Mounted it on a rooftop and used to drop a hundred kilos of mining explosives on top of the barracks. Leveled the place,” he finished cheerfully.

“All right,” she said. “We’re en route. Between your cells and the folks I’ve got on the squadron, we should be able to get some order in place - and then we’ll bring in some transmission gear.”

“‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’?” Anthony replied.

“Something like that,” Lori told him, a moment of amusement managing to penetrate her veneer of shock after the sheer violence of the pass.

“Well, the miners are ready to stand behind you,” he told her. “They remember your fa—”

Silence. Even as the com cut off, there was a sudden bright flash on the horizon, in the direction of Karlsberg.

“
Hold on
,” Leclair snapped. “Everybody, shockwave inbound -
hit the deck.
”

The pilot matched actions to words, flipping every rotor to horizontal and driving the aircraft towards the ground. Lori was wondering just
what
Leclair was doing - and then the shockwave hit.

Leclair had managed to get the gunship into the trees, sheltered from the worst of it, and it still took every erg of power the rotors could put out to hold the tilt-rotor aircraft in one place.

Another gunship, which hadn’t made it as low, was caught by the shockwave and slammed into the trees with enough force to break both several trees and the aircraft in half. The explosion of the gunship’s fuel tanks and munitions was an exclamation point on the shockwave, and Lori stared at the fire that had been seven of her people in shock.

“Everybody, get down on the ground,” Leclair ordered. “We’ll need to double check everything before we fly again - that’s going to have done a number on the rotors.”

“What the
hell
was that?” Lori finally asked shockily as she reached for the com to try to raise Anthony again.

“I’m only guessing,” Leclair said quietly, “but I
think
that was a kinetic strike. There’s no point grabbing the com, boss - even if I’m wrong, it’s only about
what
did it, not what happened.

“Karlsberg is gone.”

#

Several hours after arriving aboard
Tides of Justice
found Damien joining Alaura in the office attached to her quarters. The Hand poured herself a glass of wine and offered the bottle to Damien.

“Drink?”

“Coffee, please,” he replied. “It’s a little early in the day for those of us without iron stomachs.”

She raised her glass in silent acceptance and produced a carafe and a cup out of the collection of silverware and glasses on the small table next to her desk. Presumably, some minion from Harmon’s crew kept the table stocked - Damien knew from experience that the Hand’s cybernetic stomach allowed her to drink alcohol without getting drunk, and the woman tended to abuse that over drinking coffee.

“How’s Olympus Mons?” she asked after filling his cup.

“It’s winter,” Damien replied dryly. “Everyone who can’t get to the southern hemisphere has locked themselves in the mountain and is pretending there isn’t three feet of snow outside.”

While the mountain wasn’t
that
far north, the section of it that housed what was currently the Mage-King’s palace was high up. Three feet of snow wasn’t an exaggeration - but you didn’t have to leave the hemisphere to avoid it, just travel to the foot of the mountain.

“Ah, so
that’s
why you were so eager to join me on this mission,” Alaura concluded. The gray-haired woman perched on the edge of her desk, watching him carefully over the rim of her glass. “I don’t expect Ardennes to get that exciting.”

“When His Majesty hints that it’s time for one of his pupils to get real world experience, said pupil obeys,” Damien observed dryly. “Also, Kiera is now thirteen, and in the throes of the worst teenage crush I’ve ever seen.”

It took Alaura a long moment to realize how that related to Damien leaving Mars.

“On you,” she finally realized aloud. “The girl second in line to the Throne has a crush on you, and your response is to flee the planet?”

Damien glared at her for a moment, then corrected her.

“System, Alaura,” he pointed out. “My response to a teenage crush by the daughter of the most powerful man alive was to flee the
system
.”

The Hand, one of the thirteen most powerful men and women alive, laughed at him.

“That seems surprisingly legitimate,” she replied. With a shrug and a hand gesture, she flipped the data on her wrist computer’s display onto a wallscreen.

“Moving on to our actual job,” she continued, “this is Ardennes.”

Damien studied the oddly colored planet on the screen carefully. The pale purple native trees were extremely hardy and had managed to spread across easily seventy percent of the planet’s surface. Massive deposits of heavy metals and rare earths, combined with those trees, had made the planet an attractive target for colonization. A massive fault line, clearly visible even in the zoomed out holo, rendered one of the three continents not-quite-uninhabitable, but the other two were temperate and resource-rich.

“MidWorld with a Navy refueling station,” he said aloud. The MidWorlds were the thirty-three systems that were fully self-sufficient, but didn’t have the massive industrial complexes of the original Core Worlds. “His Majesty said that would be our destination, but I think he believed you would have more up-to-date details.”

“I do, but not as many as I’d like,” Alaura told him. “One of the - many - warning signs that something isn’t quite right on Ardennes is that the Runic Transceiver Array on the planet is restricted to government use. I’m getting reports, but they’re coming in by more roundabout routes than usual.”

Damien leaned back in his seat, gesturing for her to continue. One of his many lessons on Mars had been that learning usually required simply listening.

“Mage-Governor Vaughn has been in charge of Ardennes for thirty years now. That’s unusual, but not unheard of,” she allowed. “In that time, Ardennes has undergone an explosion of industry and resource extraction. Again, this isn’t unheard of, but there are rumors.”

“We’ve learned the hard way not to ignore those kinds of rumors,” she continued grimly, and Damien nodded. He’d visited a world once where the locals had eventually been forced to overthrow a corporate occupation by force. They’d ended up becoming one of the most rabid UnArcana worlds, blaming the Mages of the Protectorate for not saving them.

“We began asking questions and slipping agents in a year ago,” Alaura explained. “Shortly
before
that, small campaigns of violence began to pop up. Nothing really major - a couple of strikes turning into riots, a few bombings. Enough to draw our attention, but nobody died.”

“That changed about six months ago. Someone began launching a very well organized, very well equipped guerilla war. It lasted a month, maybe two. Then it quieted down - as if someone had made a very specific point.

“More recently, a series of cruder, more vicious attacks has been launched,” she finished quietly. “Civilians have died - very different modus operandi, but still operating against Vaughn.

“With the civilian deaths, Mage-Governor Vaughn has formally requested our assistance. I think something stinks,” she concluded, “but he has that right.”

Damien slowly nodded, processing as best as he could.

“So what do we do?” he asked carefully.

“Three steps,” Alaura replied. “First, we stop the fighting - by whatever means necessary. There is a Navy cruiser squadron in system we can call on for heavy support, but I’d rather negotiate a cease fire.”

“Second, we identify whatever grievances are triggering this revolt. If they’re legitimate, we arbitrate negotiations to find a compromise acceptable to everyone,” she shook her head. “It’s
usually
possible, especially when backed by a Hand.”

“And third?” Damien asked.

“Third, we punish the criminals,” she said flatly. “Murderers on both sides - rebels who blew up civilians, cops who gunned down innocents. The torturers, the killers - all of them spend a good long while in prison.”

“Where there are legitimate grievances, we will
correct
them,” Alaura continued calmly. “But no-one kills or tortures the innocent and walks away.”

Her words hung in the silent air as Damien considered them. While he knew Hands usually did attempt to find workable compromises, they were more known for the first and third of her steps than the second.

A ping on Alaura’s computer attracted both of their attentions, and Alaura slowly read whatever showed up on her screen.

“Interesting,” she murmured slowly.

“My lady?”

“I don’t normally like to jump to the interstellars’ bidding,” she told him. “But the CEO of MagnaCorp Interstellar just asked me to meet with him. And offered to break free
any
two hour stretch that worked for me.”

“And?” Damien asked.

“MagnaCorp operates in thirty-six systems and employs just over fifteen million people,” Alaura told him. “Rickard’s time is booked in five minute chunks - six months in advance.”

“He’ll also have the resources to know I’m heading to Ardennes - and one of their big operations is there.”

She checked her schedule and glanced back up at Damien with a thin smile.

“Feel up to a shuttle flight, My Lord Envoy?”

Damien returned the smile.

“Only if I get to fly, My Lady Hand,” he told her.

#

Despite having kept up his simulator time while secluded in Olympus Mons, Damien let out a sigh of relief as he settled the agile Navy shuttle on the landing pad outside MagnaCorp’s headquarters on Tau Ceti
f
. Chilly and damp, the planet had decided to show them an unfriendly face with a vicious storm taking shape over the southern continent as they were landing.

Despite his rustiness, he’d managed to take the shuttle through the rain and gale-force winds without any issues. No-one else needed to know how white his knuckles had been through the process!

The rain continued to hammer down around the shuttle, make a hissing sound as the drops hit and evaporated from the shuttle’s hull, still heated from entry.

“We’ll meet Mister Rickard inside,” Alaura told him, unstrapping herself from the co-pilots seat. “I don’t blame him for not wanting to come out in this to greet us,” she gestured at the rain.

Damien nodded and gestured for her to lead the way. They stepped out into the rain, but none of the drops hit them. He glanced at Alaura and realized she was holding a shield of kinetic energy over their heads. It seemed a waste of energy to him, but he had been trained in a tradition that avoided the open use of magic as a sign of humility.

“It would never do for a Hand or an Envoy to appear looking like soaked rats,” she murmured to him as they approached the main doors for the central sky scraper of MagnaCorp Interstellar’s corporate campus. The campus was about five kilometers outside Tau Ceti
f
‘s largest city, but the central tower rivaled any of the skyscrapers of the official downtown to their west.

The skyscraper was barely five minutes’ walk away from the landing pad - probably closer than Damien would have been comfortable putting it, but convenient.

He followed Alaura as she walked through the main doors of the skyscraper like she owned the place, walking up to the front desk as if walking in out of the storm was a normal thing.

“I am here to meet Tomas Rickard,” she told the receptionist before the elegantly coiffed blond young man finished gawking at her. “We are expected.”

“So you are,” an amused voice interrupted before the receptionist found his voice. “Space Traffic Control called ahead - I apologize for the weather.”

“Whatever worlds we travel to, Mother Nature still does not respond to our every whim, Mister Rickard,” Alaura replied, giving the speaker a small nod. “Envoy Montgomery, this is Tomas Rickard, Chief Executive Officer of MagnaCorp Interstellar. Mister Rickard, this is…”

“Envoy Damien Montgomery,” Rickard interrupted, closing the space and offering his hand to Damien. MagnaCorp’s CEO was an immense man, with skin and hair so fair as to be almost pure white and ice blue eyes. “It is a pleasure to meet the man who ended the Blue Star Syndicate’s depredations upon our galaxy.”

Damien shook his hand.

“Many others played a part in breaking apart Blue Star,” he admitted. “You are very well informed - I was not aware my Warrant had been announced in Tau Ceti.”

“It is… a job requirement,” Rickard said grimly. “I am aware of your Warrant, and also that you and Lady Stealey are headed to Ardennes.” The CEO glanced at the receptionist, then jerked his head towards an elevator.

“Let’s discuss this in my office,” he continued. “I don’t think what either of us has to say is for everyone’s ears.”

#

Rickard’s office was large, as expected of the head of an interstellar corporation, occupying the entire north-western quarter of the top floor of the building. The windows on the two exterior walls gave the CEO and his guests a spectacular view of the vicious storm pounding the complex outside.

Inside, the office was surprisingly austere for its scale. A significant chunk of it had been re-purposed to a conference room with absolute top-of-the-line communication equipment, but the rest was almost empty beyond a large but simple desk and a collection of more comfortable chairs by an auto-bar.

He gestured them to the chairs and stepped over to the auto-bar.

“Drinks? The bar makes a fantastic fortified hot chocolate.”

A minute later, all three of them settled into the sinfully comfortable chairs with their hot chocolates, watching the lightning outside.

“I must admit, Mister Rickard, I was surprised by your request,” Alaura told him. “It’s rare that the head of an interstellar corporation is willing to put that much effort into meeting with a Hand.”

“And it always means we need a favor,” Rickard admitted cheerfully. “In this case, I’m hoping to be able to
do
you a favor as well.”

“Oh?” Alaura answered, uncommittedly.

The CEO sighed and then gestured to the window next to them. An image that Damien guessed had been preloaded for activation loaded onto a video screen concealed in the glass.

It had been, at some point, a huge industrial complex. Now, a third of the complex was lost to a crater that started outside the image, and many of the remaining buildings were knocked down. Any fires had clearly been put out by the time the photograph was taken, but the complex was probably a complete write off.

“This
was
the fusion reactor manufacturing plant on Ardennes,” Rickard said quietly. “We built and tested fusion cores from one megawatt toys to one gigawatt mass-production plants here, then exported them across the Protectorate. This shot was as of two weeks ago, the latest news I have from Ardennes.”

“What happened?” Damien asked, leaning forward to get a closer look.

“Our plant ended up as the center point of a mid-sized industrial district just outside one of Ardenes’ larger cities. The factory next door was a chemical processing plant. Something went wrong and it blew the hell up.