Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  The sergeant in charge kicked his assault rifle over to Damien with his hands in the air.

  “Je ne mourir pas pour cette,” he spat. “I won’t die to arrest the harmless,” he continued in English.

  “You and your men over there,” Damien ordered, gesturing the Scorpions away from their weapons and prisoners. Nodding and signaling for his men to follow him, the Scorpion squad leader obeyed.

  Damien waited for the soldiers to back themselves into the corner, well away from their prisoners and weapons, then turned his attention to those prisoners.

  They were a sad-looking collection of men and women in businesswear. They’d clearly been forced to sleep in the clothes they’d been wearing when the Scorpions had stormed the hotel, and several of them had visible bruises.

  “Are you all able to move?” he asked gently.

  The politicians looked around at each other for a moment, and then a gray-haired man with a neatly trimmed beard stepped forward.

  “None of us are badly injured,” he said grimly. “But you’ll understand if I fear a scheme of some kind to damn us all? We have done nothing - we are not rebels, just politicians.”

  “That distinction is unfortunately now lost on your governor,” Damien told him gently. “I am Envoy Montgomery, I’m here to help you. I won’t make you come with me, but I wouldn’t recommend staying.”

  The old man glanced around at his people, then sighed.

  “I am Jacob Pierre,” he said quietly. “Leader of the Ardennes Green Party, such as our Governor has allowed it to be. We have several handicapped individuals who travel by wheelchair. I am not certain…”

  “We have a vehicle waiting,” Damien cut him off. “What we do not have is time, Monsieur Pierre.”

  Pierre drew himself up for a moment, as if offended, and then released all of his tension in a single breath and a firm nod.

  “Of course.” He turned to his people. “Let’s get moving everyone. Joe, Raul, help Lori. Everyone else - follow Montgomery.”

  “Thank you,” Damien told him softly.

  “If we live… thank you.”

  The main opposition party of the Ardennes Planetary Parliament may have been bruised and exhausted, but the chance to escape got them to move with a will. Damien led the way out of the hotel, pointedly not hearing the gasps from some of the more impressionable members at the shattered state of the corridor outside.

  “Riordan, we’re on our way,” he radioed. “Please tell me you’ve got a truck.”

  “I’ve got a truck, but I haven’t heard anything from Amiri,” the rebel replied, his voice worried. “I…” he swallowed, “I don’t think we’ve got cover fire.”

  “We’ll deal,” Damien told him. “And if we don’t hear anything, I’ll go back for her, Mikael. Your planet’s already killed too many of my friends.”

  No-one barred their way, and he led the Greens to the service entrance without any issues. Riordan was waiting for them with the big armored truck, standing next to the back of the truck as he pulled down the door.

  “We don’t have a ramp,” Riordan told the one woman in a wheelchair. For a moment, the rebel looked helpless, but the two burly men already accompanying her simply grinned.

  “We made this far, monsieur,” one of them said. “Clear the way pour un moment, we will see it done.”

  Damien gestured the rest of his rescuees away from the truck while he kept an eye for the rest of the Scorpions. The two big staffers picked up the wheelchair bodily and heaved it into the back of the truck, with Riordan helping guide the chair into the body of the truck.

  “All right,” Riordan said to the rest once the woman was aboard. “Get aboard - it’s going to be cramped, but it’s what we’ve got.”

  Pierre started to corral his people, the party leader showing a sense of experience at organizing this particular stampede. Glancing over at Damien and Riordan, he gestured them towards the front of the truck with a nod of his head.

  “I’ll get them sorted,” he said softly. “Just… get us out of here. I owe you both.”

  Damien nodded and followed Riordan to the front of the truck. Swinging into the cab, he took stock of their resources.

  “We have no guns,” Riordan said quietly. “The only heavy weapon I had was the battle laser Amiri took. If they try to stop us…”

  Amiri had been supposed to provide covering fire with the laser from above the resort, but she still wasn’t on the radio. Damien wasn’t sure what had happened to her, but the immense avalanche that had swept the mountain suggested unpleasant possibilities.

  “I’ll deal with it,” Damien repeated. Before he could say more, Pierre swung up into the cab.

  “Everyone’s aboard,” the politician said quietly. “I’m not sure how you’re getting the truck out through the avalanche, though.”

  “Yeah, I was hoping I’d get some explanation of that before I drove into something,” Riordan agreed.

  “Magic,” the Envoy told them drily. “I figured that was obvious?”

  “So what do I do?” Riordan demanded, shaking his head.

  “Just drive,” Damien instructed. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

  Muttering under his breath, Riordan threw the big truck into gear. The engine came to life with a roar, and the vehicle lurched into motion. They drove out of the service lane and around the hotel, allowing Damien his first look at the disaster zone they had made of the road.

  There had been tanks and armored personnel carriers lined up across the entrance. He couldn’t tell - there was no sign of any vehicles in the field of devastation. Two entire buildings had been ripped to pieces and scattered across the road, and rocks from the cliffside they’d collapsed filled the pass leading down the mountain.

  He swallowed hard. It had been a logical, easy, plan - take out a significant chunk of Travere’s troops, and distract the rest. Looking at the shattered field in front of him, with red and black uniformed soldiers digging desperately to try to find their friends, it didn’t seem quite so logical or easy anymore.

  “Take us over the avalanche zone,” he finally ordered Riordan, drawing power to him for the spell he’d need. “I can’t give you a lot of traction, so just go straight.”

  Even while looking at him like he was crazy, the Freedom Wing rebel obeyed. The heavy truck rumbled across the resort’s grounds towards the devastated field. They were most of the way there before anyone spotted them, then people started pointing and gesturing.

  Damien wasn’t worried about the soldiers. He was watching for Mages, knowing that at least half a dozen more of them were around. Some of them had to be buried with the tanks, but he couldn’t count on all of them being out of the fight.

  “Hold on,” he murmured as the rock-pile approached, and released the power he’d summoned. Riordan cursed in shock as his wheels left the ground, running on iron-straight rails of solidified air.

  “Just drive,” Damien ordered. The other man obeyed, while Pierre stared on in shock as they drove on air, rising to easily four or five meters over the debris field.

  “Watch out!” the party leader snapped.

  Holding his attention on the road he was forging in the air, Damien could barely spare enough attention to spot the soldier with the rocket launcher that Pierre was pointing out. Despite his intent, he couldn’t spare the energy to counter-attack, and for a moment prepared to drop the truck to protect it.

  Then the soldier’s torso exploded in a puff of red, the telltale sign of an invisible military-grade laser. More explosions followed on the ground around him, ice and rock vaporizing in small explosions as the battle laser walked across the field, driving the Scorpions back.

  It seemed Amiri was okay after all.

  #

  Amiri didn’t remember anything between ducking under the rock outcropping, and waking up with a start in a dark pocket, slightly short of breath. The clock in her goggles informed her she’d only been unconscious for a few minutes, and the lump on the b
ack of her head suggested she’d been hit by debris.

  From the staleness of the air she was breathing, she was pretty sure her little pocket was running out of oxygen, and fast. As she scrabbled to her knees in the pitch-black space, though, her hands fell on the familiar metal stock of the battle laser.

  The air was sparse enough she could feel herself starting to panic, and she forced the panic down. She’d been in worse spots in her years as a bounty hunter. Well, one worse spot, and her brother had saved her from that.

  Montgomery was too busy to save her, which left it up to her. Taking a deep breath of the heavy air, she picked up the laser and carefully activated its screen. It appeared undamaged, which given the notoriously fragile nature of even military laser weapons was a minor miracle.

  Setting it for a wide cone, she pointed it away from the rock behind her and fired. Super-heated steam filled her impromptu cave as snow vaporized and blasted away - but she only got a tiny glimpse of blue sky before more snow and rocks filled the hole again.

  Swallowing, she aimed higher and set the weapon for a maximum duration beam - one that would require most of a minute of cooling before being fired again.

  This time, the steam exploded outwards as she blasted a woman-high hole through the debris and snow. Unsure how long the gap would remain, she dove for it, pulling herself most of the way out before it started to collapse on her.

  She almost lost her boots, but she managed to get out and onto the side of the mountain.

  The mountainside beneath her was strewn with debris, a long trail of destruction stretching down and past the battered resort nestled in the valley beneath her. The landscaping had preserved the hotel itself, though it looked like something had collapsed an entire wall’s worth of suites.

  As she breathed deeply of the frigid mountain air, she spotted one of the heavy trucks rip out from behind the hotel, heading for the exit. All of the Scorpions looked to be digging for their friends, which meant it was almost certainly Montgomery and Riordan.

  Checking her weapon, she realized the laser was still overheating - and it looked like they were going to need her help a lot faster than the weapon would cool on its own, even in the mountain air.

  She stared at the snow in front of her for at least five seconds before the solution came to her. Laying down, she quickly packed snow over the battle laser, using the debris from her avalanche to build a rough weapon mount and cooling sleeve.

  The laser was still insisting it needed to cool - and as she finished packing in the snow, she spotted the Scorpion with the rocket launcher. Regardless of what the weapon’s computer thought, it was out of time.

  Setting it to the lowest energy level and holding her breath, she lined up the laser and fired.

  The man with the rocket launcher exploded away from the beam, a chunk of his flesh exploding into hydrostatic shock waves that couldn’t possibly leave him alive.

  Then she lay down a slow, low-energy suppressive fire. The Scorpions had had a really, really, bad day. If they were willing to keep their heads down, she was willing to let the rest of them live.

  Finally, the flying - seriously, Montgomery?! - truck touched down on the road beneath the avalanche and began to trundle away to safety.

  “Amiri, are you okay?” Montgomery demanded over the radio.

  “Got buried, had a laser,” she replied. She glanced back at her pack. “I don’t think my hang glider is intact, I’m going to have to hike my way out.”

  “I doubt the mountain is stable enough, Agent,” the Envoy said dryly. “Give me your co-ordinates.”

  She did. “Why?” she followed up. “What are you going to do?”

  Silence answered for a moment, then Riordan replied.

  “Apparently, he’s going to jump out the side of the truck and use magic to land safely,” the rebel told her. “I’m not entirely what his plan is from there.”

  Amiri barely had time to wonder what the kid was thinking when there was a sudden popping noise, triggering a minor slide of snow thirty feet away from her. Spinning towards the noise and drawing her sidearm, she found Montgomery standing there, delicately balanced on the debris and wreckage their plan had scattered across the mountain.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  “I refuse to allow my best ally on this rock to break her fool neck trying to climb down a mountain we just demonstrated is unstable as hell, Julia,” Montgomery told her bluntly, crossing the snow to her gently. He offered her his arm. “May I give you a lift?”

  “Has anyone told you that you’re insane?”

  “My old crew called me that a few times,” he replied innocently as she stepped closer to him and hooked her arm through his. “I never did understand why. Hold on.”

  She didn’t even get a chance to ask why before the mountain disappeared, to be replaced by their hotel suite in High Ardennes.

  The ex-bounty hunter, a hardened soldier, spacer, and spy… glared at Montgomery for all of ten seconds before she noisily threw up on him.

  #

  Chapter 24

  Lori met Riordan and his passengers in a parking garage at the edge of town. The big military truck barely fit into the first floor of the concrete structure, but it was at least out of sight from any watching satellites or Navy warships.

  “Please tell me you have some plan for getting us out of here,” Riordan told her as he dropped out of the truck. “I… didn’t fully expect Montgomery to succeed, so I didn’t plan past getting here. I have places to put them,” he continued, “but they’ll track the truck here, and we can’t afford for them to track us away from here.”

  “Maintenance tunnels,” Lori told him calmly. “I used to play in them as a child, and one of our people ‘borrowed’ the access codes from their servers after we set this as the rendezvous point.”

  Jacob Pierre joined the pair, taking Lori’s hands in his own and bowing over them.

  “Mademoiselle Armstrong,” he greeted her softly. “It appears I have the impetuous rebellion of yours that I have long berated to thank for my life.”

  “You have Envoy Montgomery to thank,” she replied uncomfortably. “We… couldn’t risk acting with our own resources - we would have put all High Ardennes at risk.”

  “Of course,” Pierre agreed. “I did not expect you to save us, Lori,” he admitted. “We… spent too long castigating you for having the courage to act. You were right, and I was wrong. Vaughn is too far gone to be convinced or swayed.”

  “One of us had to stay,” Lori reminded him. “Someone had to try, and you had the patience for it, not me.”

  “We need to get these people moving, Lori,” Riordan told her. “After the disaster Montgomery made of the resort and Travere’s battalion, I don’t think they followed us - but Montoya will be moving new troops into place as we speak, and asking for help from Cor.”

  Lori nodded and gestured for the rescues spilling out of the truck to follow her.

  “It won’t smell overly nice,” she told them over her shoulder, “but the maintenance tunnels are supposed to be secure. Any record that we used them will be wiped too, so the trail will end here. You’ll be safe.”

  She opened the door and gestured for the refugees to go past her. One of her Freedom Wing soldiers was waiting on the other side, and began to gently guide the Green Party politicians and staffers into the underground network.

  “I thought we were safe at Sunshine,” Pierre finally murmured from behind her. “I’ve spent years keeping us completely separate from your Wing. We’ve done nothing.”

  “Except oppose Vaughn,” Lori told him. “That, it seems, is now enough. No resistance will be tolerated, all dissent will be crushed. He thinks he’s blamed us for the death of a Hand, Jacob, and that’s the fire he’ll burn us all in given half a chance.”

  “But the Envoy is working with you,” Pierre objected. “That means… Mars knows what happened.”

  “Montgomery knows what happened,” Riordan said quiet
ly. “I don’t know what the man’s plan is, but he wants our help. So…”

  “I asked him to rescue you,” the Freedom Wing’s leader told Pierre. “To prove both that we could trust him, and that he was, well, worth the risk.”

  Jacob Pierre shivered at the thought.

  “I saw him fight Travere,” the old politician admitted. “I don’t think anyone else did, but there was a gap in the shutters I could see through. He took on Travere and two of his Enforcers and killed them. A Marine Combat Mage shouldn’t have been able to do that. Nobody could have.”

  “But he did,” Lori said grimly.

  “He did,” Pierre confirmed. “And made it look easy. I don’t know what Montgomery is, Lori, but I don’t think he is just a Mage - or just an Envoy! He’s a dangerous ally, but…” he shrugged as the last of his people made their way into the tunnels.

  “If you want to know if he’s worth it, he is,” he finished bluntly. “If nothing else, his word alone will hang Vaughn when the next Hand arrives to avenge Alaura - a mere Governor against an Envoy?”

  “So what, we should get him on side and then sit on him?” Lori asked.

  Pierre laughed, a sharp bark that seemed to surprise him as well as Lori.

  “It would be wise,” he agreed. “But… I do not think ‘sitting on’ Montgomery is going to happen.” The old man glanced after his people, then back at Lori.

  “I don’t expect I will see Montgomery again until all of this is settled,” he concluded aloud. “But you will, I am sure. Give him my thanks for my life, and the lives of my people.”

  “I will,” Lori promised.

  “Stay alive, my dear,” Pierre told her, then set off down the tunnels after his staff, leaving Lori and Riordan standing alone in the rapidly darkening parkade.

  “How long until they find the truck?” she asked.

  “I’m pretty sure it has a tracker,” Riordan admitted. “An hour, maybe two.”