Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “The only thing we have that can get into the Bastille is that little golden toy of yours,” she reminded him. “Last time I checked, that would mean you have to go there. But I can’t speak to Desmond, I’ll get stuck with flunkies.”

  “Correct on all points but one,” the Envoy told her dryly, then held up his wrist with the personal computer. The Hand was slotted into one of the data access ports and a regular data key was in one of the others.

  Every time she saw the Hand, Amiri started to get nervous. Damien was… young, polite, and, with the Runes of Power carved into his body, an extraordinarily powerful Mage. She also knew, unlike most, that he already had a body count to make serial killers blush.

  He also seemed to be under the illusion it was possible to have the Hand without being a Hand. No-one in the galaxy would question the right of someone bearing that icon to give any order they wished, to wield the full power of the Mage-King. However, it had ended up in his hands, it was his Hand. Which meant that, regardless of what the earnest young man sitting on the bed thought, he was a Hand of the Mage-King of Mars.

  Montgomery was a small man, looking almost like a child as he sat cross-legged on the bed. He was young and earnest, and more than a little attractive - and she was terrified of him.

  “Which point am I wrong on?” she finally asked.

  “The Hand is not the only tool we can break the Bastille’s defenses with,” he told her. “While the icon itself can override any of our computers, anywhere, anytime, it can also generate onetime override codes that can be used separately from it.”

  He pulled the data key from his PC and handed it to Amiri. She took it, staring down at it in shock. It felt far too light for what was arguably one of the more powerful cyber-weapons in the galaxy.

  “That data key carries a code that will disable the Bastille’s defenses under a Royal Override,” Montgomery continued. “In theory, it should only work once. In practice…” he shrugged. “It’s quite possible it could be re-used repeatedly on different systems.”

  “That’s… dangerous to give the Wing,” she said slowly. “We’re working with them for now, but…”

  “They may still turn against the Protectorate,” Montgomery agreed. “That’s why I’m not giving it to them. I’m giving it to you. You’ll have to accompany the Bastille strike, de-activate the defenses for them.”

  She stared down at the key for a long moment.

  “And how am I supposed to keep you alive if I’m a hundred kilometers away while you assault one of the most fortified locations on the planet?” she asked.

  “When not concussed, I am generally capable of taking care of myself,” he said dryly. “Perhaps more to the point, my understanding is that Alpha’s plan is more of an infiltration than an outright assault.

  “Also, I need you at the Bastille,” he finished softly. “While Vaughn may have chosen to shove his Freedom Wing prisoners in there, it is a maximum security prison. The kind of people who end up in those places… I don’t want them out by accident.”

  There was a tinge of what might have been… guilt? in his words. Amiri wasn’t sure what that was about - but she also knew that she didn’t have Montgomery’s whole story. She wasn’t sure if anyone who hadn’t been on his old ship did, who was alive at least. Stealey had to have known it all.

  “All right,” she allowed. “But if you get yourself killed, I will find a way to bring you back so I can kill you again myself. Understood?”

  #

  Lori wasn’t expecting to interrupt much of anything when she barged into Sierra’s room - the Legatan woman was a quiet sort, with no hobbies the rebel leader was aware of. What she found forced her to a sudden standstill, and she began slowly shuffling back.

  “You may as well stay,” the other woman told her. Sierra was kneeling on the ground, an open book laying on the ground before her. Returning to the book, she continued to read, softly.

  “He trains my hands for battle, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze. You have also given me the shield of Your salvation, And Your right hand upholds me; And Your gentleness makes me great.”

  Closing the Bible, Sierra crossed herself and rose smoothly to her feet.

  “How may I help you, Alpha?”

  Lori studied the Legatan soldier carefully. Religion was not uncommon in the Protectorate - most of Ardennes’ people were Quebec Reformation Catholics - but it was generally regarded as something private. While she recognized the Psalm Sierra had been reading, it caused her to look at the woman in a new light.

  “I’m sorry for interrupting,” she said finally. “I should have waited.”

  “We are effectively at war,” Sierra told her with a small smile. “God will understand.”

  “I should still at least knock, Alissa,” Lori acknowledged, and Alissa Leclair bowed slightly.

  “Apology accepted, then,” the Legatan woman told her. “And I repeat myself: how may I help?”

  “What did you think of Montgomery?” Lori asked. She’d asked the other woman to accompany her as much as a bodyguard as anything else, though having now met the unassuming man who bore the Mage-King’s Warrant, she wasn’t sure she’d ever been in danger.

  “He’s… not what I expected,” Leclair allowed. “But I think that makes him more dangerous, not less. He would not bear the paper he bears were he weak.”

  “Do you think he can do what he promises?”

  Access to the Bastille and the liberation of Leclair’s pilots would be a game-changer - one that would enable them to do something, even though Lori wasn’t yet sure what that something would be yet.

  “Yes,” the Legatan said flatly. “But I worry about hitching ourselves to him, Alpha. We look to Mars to save us from Versailles - but Versailles answers to Mars. How blind can they have been?”

  “You think we shouldn’t work with him?”

  Leclair glanced away and sighed.

  “No, I think we have to work with him,” she admitted. “Or Vaughn will burn us all down with him - Montgomery offers a chance to stop him. But watch your step,” the pilot told Lori. “He won’t be here next year. He doesn’t have to live with the consequences - and he won’t share your vision of Ardennes.”

  “Except of an Ardennes that no longer has Michael Vaughn as Governor.”

  “Yeah,” Leclair snorted. “That vision he shares. Vaughn killed a Hand. A Hand falls. Another rises. Mars will burn him to ash. It’s the world after Vaughn where you may have problems.”

  “Sufficient unto today are the sins thereof,” Lori told her quietly. “Without him we have nothing.”

  “I’m here to help, boss,” the Legatan woman who’d trained and commanded Lori’s handful of aircraft pilots told her. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Pick someone else to lead the Bastille op,” Lori instructed. “I’ve got a plan to get Montgomery into and out of the Transceiver Array, but I want a fall-back if everything falls apart. You’re it - you’ll fly him in and out in one of the gunships.”

  “I’ll have some kind of ID for this stunt, right?” Leclair asked. “We are talking the Array in the middle of the Nouveaux Versailles government district, after all. Security is going to be damned tight.”

  “You’ll have an ID, even an official flight plan,” the Freedom Wing’s leader promised. “If everything goes according to plan, no-one will ever know you were there.”

  Leclair shook her head. “I think I’ve heard that one before,” she replied dryly. “I don’t remember it ending well.”

  #

  Chapter 27

  The Freedom Wing’s underground airbase was impressive to Damien. They’d clearly spent a lot of time and resources blasting the secret facility into the mountain, and then covering up what they’d done to anyone looking from outside or above.

  It reminded him, in many ways, of Olympus Mons. Of course, the Mountain had been dug out to protect against a world with an atmosphere - then, at least - hostile to human life. Freedom Wing�
�s Airbase Alpha had been designed to hide.

  He and Amiri had entered the base through a natural-appearing cave he would have completely dismissed had Riordan not led them directly to it. The rebel had used a flashlight to guide their way through the rough terrain, until the cave had smoothed out and met a large metal hatch, still with no lighting.

  Once inside the security hatch and past the armed guards, the complex turned into machine-smoothed stone walls and floors familiar to any resident of Olympus Mons. It lacked the runes that turned Olympus Mons into a giant amplifier, but those were unique. They had been carved to allow the Olympus Project to identify even the tiniest sparks of magical gift and judge the successes of their eugenics program.

  The failures of said program had covered large swathes of Olympus Mons in small, unmarked, graves.

  Damien shivered. For all that his home was now under a mountain, cave complexes made him claustrophobic.

  They had, at least, now entered the main hangar area. From the size of the space, he assumed it had started as a natural cavern - there was no way they could have excavated the immense open space the helicopter gunships sat in without attracting some attention.

  The gunships themselves held most of Damien’s attention. They were impressive craft, twenty meters from the tip of the nose to the end of the tail rotor. Instead of the single rotor assembly of a less stealthy aircraft, they had an assembly on either side of the main craft, with casings wrapped around the rotors to muffle the sound. The entire chassis was coated in a dark gray ceramic coating he recognized from one of the many intelligence briefings on Mars - a radar absorbing material developed by the Legatus Armed Forces.

  Looking over the aircraft again, he realized he recognized them from that same briefing.

  “Last time I checked, the Phantom V wasn’t supposed to leave Legatus,” he said mildly to Riordan. “Something about Charter restrictions on top-line military hardware.”

  The Wing had acquired more than just the gunships, too. There were crates of munitions along one wall - enough to supply the single squadron here for a dozen battles. Fueling stations, reloading robots, maintenance gear - someone had delivered a complete mobile airbase to Ardennes, under the nose of both Vaughn’s government and the Martian Navy. It fell to Mars, after all, to enforce the Charter restrictions on top-line military hardware.

  A planet could develop whatever they wanted for their own forces, but military hardware had to be approved for inter-planet sale by Mars. It was a rule often winked at, but rarely to the extent of entire top-of-the-line aircraft squadrons ending up in the hands of rebel groups.

  “I… have no idea,” Riordan told him, the speaker and rabble-rouser looking confused. “I wasn’t involved in acquiring them.”

  “Oh, he’s right,” Sierra interjected, the Legatan pilot joining them as they stood at the edge of the underground airfield, eyeing the dangerous looking vehicles. “They’re the current generation of stealth gunship, I don’t think the LAF has even finished rolling them out to all of their own ground support units. I have no clue how the hell the smuggler we bought them from got them - and I didn’t ask,” she finished cheerfully.

  “Today, I’m glad you’ve got them,” Damien admitted, eyeing the formidable war machines. “How you got them concerns me, but today I’m glad you have them.”

  Shaking his head, he turned his attention from the gunships to the woman who commanded them.

  “This is your operation, Sierra,” he told her. “Amiri has the virus to disable the Bastille’s defenses. She’ll be able to transmit it via any short-range radio once you’re close enough - should be from outside any active kill zone.”

  “‘Should’ isn’t a reassuring word, Envoy,” Sierra said dryly. “But I get it. Hey, Brute!” she bellowed, gesturing for a small man, barely taller than Damien’s own underwhelming height but blond to the Envoy’s brunette, to join them.

  “This is Brute,” she introduced him as he approached. “He’s my second-in-command, and will be in charge of the Bastille strike force. He’ll have five gunships and thirty guys and gals with the best gear we’ve got.”

  “Bonjour,” Brute greeted them all, bowing slightly at Sierra’s introductions. “I’ve friends in the Bastille,” he told them in thickly accented English. “But those turrets and kill-bots…” he shivered.

  “Will all be shut down,” Damien promised. “And there’s almost no human presence on the site, so once the computerized weaponry shuts down, you should have a clean shot at your people.”

  Automated prisons were common in the Protectorate - highly secured facilities that would feed the prisoners, clean the cells, and prevent escapes with almost no human involvement whatsoever. It reduced the concern about objects being smuggled in, and the use of SmartDarts in at least the innermost layers of security really did allow the robots to shoot first and leave the questions for the humans.

  Of course, computer security was the top priority for prisons like the Bastille. The one thing they hadn’t counted on was someone from Mars showing up with the override codes. Since the facilities needed to be controlled by humans, there had to be override codes - and every government computer in the Protectorate could be accessed and overridden by a Hand.

  The rebels didn’t know Damien had a Hand, and that was how he planned to keep it. Even this small use of it made him feel like a fraud - he’d only had the icon for one mission, and he certainly didn’t have the authority to use it to break open a high security prison!

  But regardless of whether he was supposed to have it, he did. And he was too short on tools and allies to ignore his most powerful weapon just because he felt like a fraud.

  #

  Chapter 28

  There was something lately about small men being utterly terrifying.

  Amiri held onto the straps holding her into the gunship with white fingers as they tore over the treetops with a meter or so to spare. Brute clearly knew the exact capabilities of the aircraft he flew, and he brought them in towards the Bastille at a speed and margin that put Royal Martian Marine Corps assault pilots she’d known to shame.

  The other four gunships followed behind at a more sedate pace, leaving it to Brute and Amiri to test - and hopefully disable - the Nouveaux Versailles Bastille’s defenses.

  “We’re clearing the forest in about thirty seconds,” the pilot informed her. “There’s only about twenty kay of plains before the Bastille and we’re running at full power, not stealth - we’ll be challenged before we’re fifteen kay out and the systems will fire at ten.”

  That didn’t take much translating. Amiri slotted the data key Damien had given her into the aircraft’s communication system and accessed the files. A few keystrokes later, and she was looking up as they passed out from over the forest and into the plains near the city of Nouveau Versailles.

  A light blinked to life on the console - an incoming communication.

  “Unidentified aircraft, this is Nouveaux Versailles Bastille,” a male voice announced in a bored tone. “You appear to be on course for our facility. Please either identify yourself or change course as you are about to enter a no-fly zone that will be enforced with lethal force.”

  Amiri smiled coldly and hit the transmit key. Seconds passed.

  “Unidentified aircraft, this is the Bastille,” the voice said again, now starting to sound less bored. “I repeat, you are entering a no-fly zone enforced by automated anti-aircraft weaponry. Identify yourself or break off.”

  “Did they get the transmission?” Brute asked, his voice concerned.

  She checked the system. A blinking icon informed her she’d received a text-only message from the system.

  “We’re in and their security system is down,” she told him. “I don’t know how long till he,” she gestured at the speaker, “realizes that.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” the voice demanded. “I cannot stand down the system; if you do not identify yourself in the next thirty seconds, the guns will fire!”<
br />
  “Wish me luck,” Brute told Amiri, his hands on the controls as white as hers. “This could be very, very messy.”

  They crossed the ten kilometer mark and none of the threat indicators lit up. Amiri held her breath until they hit five kilometers and Brute began slowing the aircraft.

  “Your wonder boy delivered,” the pilot said, his voice surprised. “I’ll call in the rest of the squadron - you want to talk to cranky voice?”

  Amiri nodded and pulled up the communication system.

  “Bastille, this is the Freedom Wing,” she told them calmly. “We are now in control of your defenses. Surrender now, and no-one will be harmed.”

  The channel was silent, and Brute slowed the gunship to a halt, rotating it over the main courtyard and looking for defenders. No-one reacted for a moment, and Amiri saw the icons of the other four gunships appear on Brute’s screen.

  “You’re insane,” the Bastille controller finally replied. “You’ll never get away with this!”

  “That’s tomorrow’s problem,” Amiri told him sweetly. “We’re here for our people. Any of yours who get in the way die. Your call.”

  She killed the channel and turned to Brute.

  “Take us down,” she ordered.

  #

  At some point, Vaughn was sure, the woman in charge of the emergency command center was going to work up the nerve to tell her planet’s leader to get out of the center’s main operating theater. Depending on what was going on at that moment in time, he might even listen to her.

  Until she did, however, this was the best place to keep an eye on the events rapidly sweeping Ardennes. Allarain had been their biggest - if most mixed - success, but operations were being carried out across the planet.

  So far, most successes had been minor. Given time, however, he was sure they’d find another loose thread that would lead them to either the Wing - or perhaps even more importantly, to Montgomery. The last thing Vaughn needed was someone with authority to counter his tale of what had happened.