Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars (5 page)

“I have a neuro-electric condition,” he said slowly, clearly buying himself time to think. “It doesn’t interact well with electric shocks. I was stunned?” He paused, thinking. “Shit, Scorpions! What happened?”

“You went down, I dragged you out. Had to scuffle with a couple of the Scorpions myself, then brought you here.”

“Is this place safe? They may call the cops!”

“Mister Riordan,” Amiri said quietly, “the rooms look like this, they don’t have video cameras, and they rent by the hour. No-one in this motel is calling the police.”

Riordan finally sort of relaxed, rising to a sitting position and regarding Amiri.

“Thanks,” he said quietly. “I doubt the Scorpions wanted a pleasant discussion on the relative merits of free market capitalism versus concealed oligopolies. What’s your name?”

“Jewel,” Julia Amiri replied instantly. “And from our red and black friends’ shouting, you’re Mikael Riordan?”

“Yeah,” Riordan confirmed. “One time economics professor, one time Freedom Party member of parliament. Now public speaker for the Wing.”

“You got a place to go, Mister Riordan?” Amiri asked. “I may have ended up on the Scorpions helmet cams.”

“Damn,” he said softly. “I’m sorry. You can’t go back to wherever you were staying then - not if you’re on the WPP?”

She nodded.

“Damn,” he repeated. “Look, I’ve got a ride coming - soon as I signal, there’ll be a car coming, but they won’t have room for any extras.”

He considered for a moment and then pulled a pad of old-fashioned paper from inside his scuffed-up suit blazer. Scrawling an address on it, Riordan handed it to Amiri.

“That’s the address of a much nicer hotel than this one,” he told her. “Go there, tell them Lambda said to give you a room and a tab. They’ll take care of you.”

“I don’t just want to hide,” Amiri replied with only partially falsified eagerness. Everything she’d seen on Ardennes was pissing her off. The reports she’d sent in would probably be far more valuable to fixing the planet than anything she could do with the resistance, but she still wanted her hands in it.

Plus, a line of sight into the resistance would
not
hurt when Stealey arrived to sort things out.

Riordan hesitated for a long moment, and Amiri couldn’t shake the suspicion it was as much being an attractive woman as having saved him that made up his mind. He grabbed the pad back and noted down a code.

“You can call that number,” he said quietly. “We’ll sort out something from there, and if I need a hand with anything… I’ll contact the hotel. They’ll find you for me.”

#

Ardennes was, despite the ugliness Damien now knew was going on under the surface, an astonishingly pretty planet. Its heavy metal-rich crust and ripe-for-energy-extraction tectonic activity were what had brought the Protectorate’s attention to the world, but its indomitable ecosystem had won over its colonists’ hearts.

Even from space, where most planets in the Protectorate were green with imported Terran life, Ardennes was a pale purple. Its trees and natural life had resisted Terran imports with a success that had surprised the biochemists charged with setting up farms.

Thankfully, Ardennes’s ecosystem was also edible to humans. Even when the local flora choked out farms, there was still plenty to eat.

Tides of Justice
was slowly approaching the planet, still several light seconds away, and Damien stood on the destroyer’s bridge next to Mage-Commander Harmon. Harmon stood next to the silver simulacrum of the
Tides
that any jump ship carried at its center, his hand gently nestled on the icon that, in a strange way,
was
the million ton warship.

“What is
that
?” one of the sensor techs breathed. On the screens that surrounded the bridge with the view from thousands of cameras on the exterior of the vessel, Ardennes had rotated enough to show a thin red line.

“That’s the reason the colony only occupies two of three continents,” Damien murmured. He’d seen pictures of the massive crack in the planet’s crust while researching Ardennes, but it was still awe-inspiring to realize you were looking at a volcano visible from orbit. “It’s the Zeller Fault - a single lava field that, well, can be seen from orbit.”

“Our orbital slot is dropping us in above the Fault,” another tech reported.

“That’s the opposite side of the planet from Nouveau Versailles,” Harmon objected. “Did they give a reason?”

“Mage-Commodore Cor’s squadron are occupying the geostationary orbits above the colony,” the tech replied. “Apparently, the Governor started to get nervous after the strike.”

Mention of the squadron drew Damien’s gaze to the data overlay on the visual of the planet ahead of them. A pair of cruisers, behemoths ten times the
Tides
‘ size, hovered on the same side of the planet they were being directed to. Four more, as Ardennes Control was advising, were settled in over the capital.

Next to the ten million ton cruisers, it took Damien a moment to sort out the Ardennes Self Defense Force ships. Tau Ceti-built export destroyers, they lacked the magical amplifiers of the Martian Navy ships, but still carried all of their regular weaponry.

“How far is our orbit from Karlsberg?” Damien asked quietly.

“Almost the exact opposite side of the planet, My Lord,” Harmon replied. “Seems odd.”

“Stinks to me,” the Envoy replied. “Do me a favor?”

“What do you need?”

“Pull as much from the sensors as you can, and route our shuttle flights over the Karlsberg crater,” Damien ordered. “Run every analysis you can on every piece of data you can get. I don’t expect to get raw data from Ardennes, and I want to
know
what took out that town.”

Harmon glanced away from the screens and met Damien’s eyes. The Mage-Commander clearly wanted to ask something, but finally shook his head.

“We don’t trust Vaughn,” he said quietly. It wasn’t a question.

“No,” Damien agreed. “I’m not disbelieving him about what happened yet, either,” he pointed out. “But I want to validate every damn thing the man says.”

“As you command, Envoy.”

#

Mage-Governor Michael Vaughn watched the ship settle into orbit on his wallscreen with mixed emotions. He was
proud
of what he’d achieved on Ardennes, damn it! When he’d risen to power, the planet had been in the middle of one of the worst economic depressions the Protectorate had ever seen.

He’d single-handedly dragged his world out of recession, got the unemployed working, brought in the interstellars, and re-birthed local industry from its own ashes.

There had been sacrifices. He didn’t pretend otherwise - but they had been necessary. Some of them remained necessary, but he couldn’t bring himself to regret rigging the elections. His opponents - like Armstrong - would have undone everything! They didn’t see how fragile the edifice that supported Ardennes’ economy was, how easily their populist reforms would bring it down.

So Vaughn had done what he had to do. And when the ingrates refused to recognize the necessity of sacrifice, when they rioted or raised arms against his government… well, he did what he had to do.

He didn’t expect the kind of men and women he knew Desmond Alexander selected as his Hands to agree with him. Vaughn knew their reputation - Alexander preferred compromise to imposition, negotiation to suppression.

It was weakness - a weakness enabled by the iron fist of the Martian Navy and made easier by the Hands simply flitting away once they were done. They didn’t have to live with the compromises they made - but those they left behind did.

“My Lord Governor,” a voice said quietly behind him, and Vaughn turned to find a small and unimposing man in the red and black uniform of the Ardennes Special Security Service.

“General,” Vaughn greeted his guest with a slight nod. General James Montoya commanded the Scorpions and was one of the few Vaughn would call ‘friend’.

“We’ve put together the package,” Montoya reported, stepping up next to Vaughn and eyeing the image of the
Tides of Justice
. “Our crypto-geeks swear that even a Navy computer won’t show it as altered.”

“But?” Vaughn asked. He knew Montoya, after all.

“They did their best to support the actual impact craters,” the General said slowly. “But we couldn’t justify claiming the terrorists got their hands on naval munitions. If the Hand’s people really dig into the analysis of the site, they’ll realize the cheap rocks our video shows couldn’t have done it.”

“We’ll need to make sure they don’t,” Vaughn replied. “I will keep her distracted, focused on other matters.”

He considered the Martian warship for a long moment, and then a cold smile spread across his face.

“I want you to prep one of our ‘special’ teams,” he told the General. “
Very
carefully - they absolutely
cannot
be traced back to us.”

“What target?”

“The Hand,” Vaughn told him. “I’m sure we can arrange for her to visit one of our hotbeds of terrorist activity, and it would only make sense for them to take a shot at the symbol of the
true
oppressor, after all!”

“Risky,” Montoya said quietly. “Hands are tough - I don’t know
what
the King does to them, but I’ve seen video of them in action.”

“They’re powerful Mages, yes, but not gods,” Vaughn replied with a wave of his hand. “But to be clear, my dear James, I don’t
expect
our team to succeed. I’ll be hardly heart-broken if they do,” he admitted, “but I want them to fail. I want them to come close and die trying - I want to make this Stealey understand the true depth of our danger.”

He felt as much as saw Montoya’s nod of understanding and matching grin, and the other emotion fighting with pride and fear rippled through him: anticipation.

After all, keeping the engine of Ardennes’ ticking had become routine. But out-gaming a Hand who
had
to be suspicious of him? Bringing her in on his side and unleashing the full force of the Protectorate on his enemies?

That was a challenge he would enjoy.

#

The shuttle was much more crowded than it had been when they’d visited MagnaCorp Interstellar. For
this
trip, Alaura was bringing a staff of six and a squad of Marine bodyguards. The Marine squad leader, a grizzled Sergeant who reminded Damien of an old shipmate now dead, rode with Damien as the co-pilot.

“You and the Hand are armed, right?” the Sergeant grumbled as Damien carefully tweaked his course to sweep near Karslberg.

He glanced over at the Sergeant.

“We’re not exactly helpless unarmed,” he pointed out. The Marine, one of Alaura’s regular bodyguards, had to know what was under Damien’s and Alaura’s elbow-length black gloves.

“I’ve seen Mages fight,” the other man grunted. “You get tired - guns don’t. You
can
shoot, right?”

Damien shook his head with an intentionally audible sigh, then flipped his suit jacket open while keeping one hand on the controls.

“Martian IronWorks Arms ST-7. Caseless rounds, ceramic chassis, defeats most weapon detection systems,” he told the Sergeant, then twitched his jacket closed again over the slim, deadly pistol.

The Marine chuckled humorlessly. “Well, at least
one
of you is intelligent about it,” he said. “Sergeant Cam Mitchell, Lord Envoy,” he introduced himself. “We met when we were shipping you to Mars, but I don’t expect you to remember one grunt of many.”

“That was a stressful trip,” Damien admitted. “Still, I think I do - you were the senior Corporal under Sergeant Ames, right?”

“That was me,” Mitchell confirmed with a sad sigh. “Still miss Ames. He caught a bullet for Stealey about two years back, I inherited the squad.”

There wasn’t much Damien could say to that. He kept an eye on his scanners as he swept over the horizon, the sensor package straining to pick up anything it could from Karlsberg as he made his way to Nouveau Versailles.

“What happened?” he finally asked. “To Ames, I mean.”

Mitchell grunted again.

“Was
supposed
to be a simple arbitration of a trade dispute,” he said finally. “Just Ames and I went with the Lady. Got to the meeting point, and one delegation was dead to the man, and the other had us surrounded.

“They got off one shot,” Mitchell said grimly. “Went clean through Ames’ eye, killed him before he hit the floor. ‘Course, by the time he hit the floor, most o’
them
were dead too.”

The Sergeant glanced quickly at Damien’s gloved arms, then away. He’d seen the motion before, from men and women who’d seen Hands in action and knew that Damien also bore a Rune of Power.

“I don’t know what they thought they’d gain,” he finished. “Stealey tracked them down. It wasn’t even the trade company that had sent the delegation - it was some kind of death cult out of the UnArcana Worlds. Killed or got killed sixty men and women, just to get a shot at a Hand.”

“Even the UnArcana worlds will act on that,” Damien said softly. “Not much left of that cult now, huh?”

“
Nothing
,” Mitchell replied with grim satisfaction. “Stealey likes to negotiate. Would rather convince rebels to lay down arms, make a compromise. But she is a
Hand
, Lord Montgomery. She knows when it’s time to draw the sword.”

Damien swallowed. As an Envoy, he didn’t have the authority to order executions or judgments. He did, however, have enough power to make sure that someone
with
said authority took a close look at affairs.

The city of Nouveau Versailles finally came into view, and Damien opened up a channel with the spaceport. He was glad for the distraction, pulling his mind away from thoughts of the harsher duties of those who spoke for Mars.

#