Voice of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “We’re being taunted,” Garroway growled. “Someone is trying to provoke a reaction… quite possibly, a Protectorate reaction.”

  “Agreed. But why torture Captain Afolayan?”

  “I… think I may know the answer to that, ma’am,” the Secret Service Agent checking over the black box container told her. “If you can come take a look?”

  Activating her suit jets, Julia softly drifted over to him. A moment later, even more carefully, Sergeant Garroway followed.

  “What is it, Banes?” she asked.

  He tapped the loose wires in the compartment.

  “These connectors here,” he touched a set along the ‘top’ of the empty space, “are pretty standard. They’re feeding from the ship’s sensors, cameras, you name it. It’s a high quality box, most wouldn’t be including the ship’s internal sensors, but this guy did. Expensive, unusual, paranoid.”

  “With my kids and grand-kids, I’d be paranoid too,” Julia told him. “Doesn’t help us.”

  “No, but, speaking of paranoid, this might,” Banes replied, and grabbed a second set of wires. “This is a high-density data transfer cable – an outgoing data transfer cable. Captain Afolayan had a backup of his black box.”

  “Any idea where?”

  “No,” the agent replied, and glanced over at the captain’s body. “And unless I miss my guess, Captain Afolayan died rather than tell his attackers where he kept it, so they couldn’t find it either.”

  “All right,” Julia said, clasping her hands together and looking at her team of Marines and Secret Service forensics techs. “I guess that means its scavenger hunt time, doesn’t it?”

  Chapter 21

  “So that’s about it,” Amiri told Damien over the radio. “There’s a backup black box somewhere on this ship, and the folks boarding it were determined enough to destroy the evidence that they tortured the captain for its location.”

  “Isn’t it likely they found it, then?” he asked. The Hand was back on the bridge, standing next to Mage-Captain Jakab as they reviewed the data feeds from the Marines and Secret Service agents. The mess in the middle of the ship gave him shivers – though it seemed to hit Jakab harder. Unlike his ship’s captain, Damien had seen worse.

  “We can’t be sure,” the Agent admitted. “My comp techs are going over what they can extract of the ship’s files, and it looks like we may be able to retrieve some of the sensor and camera data, but if we can find the backup box it could save us days.”

  “You’ll need more manpower to search the entire ship,” Jakab noted. “I can have my Bosun pull together sweep teams from our engineering crews. We can probably sweep what’s left of that hulk in a day, combine it with the morgue detail.”

  Damien considered it for a moment. If there was data aboard the Mistletoe Solstice about her killers, they needed it. On the other hand…

  “Do we have any idea why they didn’t just destroy her?” he asked. “If they wanted to be sure she couldn’t identify her attackers, why not just blast her to pieces?”

  “The black box is designed to survive that,” the Duke’s captain noted. “Physically removing it and setting the hulk on a course away from the main zone could easily make it harder to identify it. And if his backup is a true copy of the box…”

  “They might have figured it would be harder to detect its beacon when it was buried in the hulk,” Amiri pointed out. “They’d have had to vaporize every last piece of her – doable, but time-consuming and more noticeable to anyone passing by.”

  “It still feels like someone is playing with us,” Damien replied. “All right, Mage-Captain, send your people over to support Agent Amiri. I want some of your computer people backing up her techs – whether we find that box or not, I want whatever sensor and camera data we can extract from the systems.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jakab replied, turning to start giving orders.

  Damien kept his attention on the communicator.

  “Julia?” he asked softly.

  “My lord?”

  “Be very careful. I don’t trust this.”

  “No shit, my lord.”

  With that, his bodyguard cut the active voice channel, though the video feed from her helmet was still showing on the screen with everyone else’s.

  “Kole,” Damien gestured the Duke’s captain to him. “I want everyone going over there either in or escorted by assault shuttles,” he ordered. “I don’t like this, and I want everyone watching for traps.”

  “I hear you, my lord,” Jakab agreed. “I’m moving us closer, keeping the hulk inside our point defense envelope. Just… in case.”

  “Carry on, Captain,” Damien told him, realizing Jakab had everything in hand.

  “Sir, the Alan-a-dale is hailing us,” Lieutenant Rain reported. “Captain Wayne wants to know if he can assist.”

  “The politicking is your job, my lord,” Jakab told him with a small bow.

  “And the boarding and sweep of the ship is now yours,” Damien agreed with a sigh. “If I can borrow your break-out room to speak to Wayne?”

  Jakab gave him a ‘go-ahead’ gesture and Damien stepped out of the bridge, with its all-encompassing view of the space outside, into the corridor leading into the rest of the ship. Jakab’s break-out room was a small meeting room attached to his office, less than five meters away from the bridge.

  “This is Montgomery,” he said calmly as he opened the channel.

  “Hand Montgomery,” Captain Wayne greeted him with a calm nod. “I understand that your people have found evidence of a backup data storage for the cameras and such? Do you need help searching for it? My crew used to serve on very similar merchant ships and may have a better idea of where the captain may have hidden such a device.”

  For a moment, Damien was even tempted. He trusted Mage-Captain Jakab’s people completely, but Wayne had just touched on his largest concern: Jakab’s people were Navy personnel. The only time they spent aboard merchant ships was looking for contraband.

  Of course, he would have to trust Captain Wayne and his people not to, say, ‘accidentally’ break the box when they found it. Even disregarding the fact that Michael Wayne rubbed Damien the wrong way, how much he could trust either of the regional militias involved in this mess was very much an open question.

  “While that could be of value,” he said slowly, choosing his words carefully, “I think I need to lock the Mistletoe Solstice down as a Protectorate-level crime scene, under my personal jurisdiction. Your offer is appreciated, but not necessary.”

  The Patrol Captain looked like he’d eaten something sour, but he nodded.

  “I understand, I suppose,” he admitted. “Is there any assistance we can provide, my lord?”

  “No,” Damien told him. “We have the area secure. If my understanding of your orders is correct, you may continue on your patrol.”

  “The Commodore wanted me to provide an observer and have one of my officers courier our observations directly to her,” Wayne said. “Would this be acceptable?”

  “Of course,” Damien allowed. One Patrol officer, kept… suitably separate from the investigation, shouldn’t be an issue. It wasn’t really a question of paranoia, but of who one could trust the most.

  That thought hit him like a thrown brick. Who one could trust the most. If you were the captain of a ship with your family aboard, trying to keep them safe… who could you trust the most?

  “Send your officer over as soon as you’re able, Captain Wayne,” Damien told the Sherwood man. “We’re going to be a bit busy with the Mistletoe for a while.”

  With a calm smile, he cut the connection and opened a shipboard link to Jakab as he started for the shuttle bay.

  “Captain, get a shuttle ready for me to fly over to the Mistletoe Solstice,” he ordered.

  “Really, sir?” the Navy officer asked, charging blithely across the line marked insubordination.

  “I think I know what they did with the box, Kole,” Damien told him. “And it’s not s
omething anyone else is going to be able to see. Have the shuttle ready.”

  “You’re the Hand, my lord.”

  #

  Damien found Amiri waiting for him when he arrived aboard the Mistletoe Solstice, his bodyguard managing to get thoroughly unimpressed body language through a space-suit. Drifting out of the safety tunnel keeping the boarders away from the shattered wreck where the engines had been destroyed, he gestured for her to follow him and locked himself to the ground, looking around.

  “We haven’t even started cleaning up or really sweeping for traps,” she told him over a private, gesturing to where a number of bodies had been pushed against the wall for later retrieval. “Why exactly are you here?”

  “Julia, how many people aboard the Duke could identify and break a gene-locked illusion spell?” he asked gently.

  “Damn, that’s possible?” she replied, thinking. “Yeah, I think Afolayan would have done something like that.”

  “It’s possible,” he confirmed. “Difficult, and only really covered in Rune Scribe training. Which Nuru Afolayan had completed the first tiers of before leaving Mars to work on her grandfather’s ship.”

  “Is that even breakable?” she asked, following him as he began to jet his way down the corridor, checking for magic with a trained eye.

  “Normally, no. They’re a fantastic security measure… assuming the Mage can renew them every month or so,” he explained. “They do, like all runes, eventually fade. They’re only so accurate on the genetic comparison, too. If Afolayan used one, any of her family would be able to pass it. She wouldn’t be able to pick and choose members.”

  “So… we’re looking for something magical, hidden with magic,” she noted. “Since you’re the only one who can even see this, am I going to have to escort you through the entire ship?”

  “If necessary, but I hope not,” he told her with a sad smile. “I was once a Ship’s Mage, after all. I know where I would have put it, and that’s a relatively short list.”

  Reaching the simulacrum chamber, he slowed unconsciously as they ran into a section of the vacuum inside the ship with visible floating blood globules in it. Even days later, the feel of magic remained in the metal and the void.

  Reading the flow of magic through runes and people, the main gift of a Rune Wright, was easy enough to explain. The feel of magic after the fact was harder. Usually, Damien would describe it as a smell, but the lack of any air here robbed that explanation of any heft.

  “One of the Ship’s Mages made their stand here,” Amiri noted. “Anyone they killed was removed, but…” she shrugged, gesturing towards where her bio tech was carefully going through the ruined body with two of the Duke’s crew, “we’re working on identifying the bodies.”

  Damien sighed, touching the torn metal to get the feel of the magic that had ripped it apart. A young woman, anywhere between twenty and twenty-five. There was only so much he could tell – there was only so much to tell, and it got harder as time passed.

  “It was Nuru,” he said quietly and certainly. “No idea where the senior Ship’s Mage was, but this was her. Everything she could do to protect her ship and her family.”

  He shivered. Only the aftermath, years ago now, of an unarmored boarding team running into an exosuited soldier with a machine gun on the Blue Jay exceeded the horror of this dark and empty ship with its crew of corpses.

  “This way,” he told Amiri, glancing around to find the door he was looking for. He wasn’t surprised, on pushing it open, to find that the room beyond had gravity. Gently controlling his own motion with magic, he stepped onto the runes the Ship’s Mages had maintained in their own private workshop.

  The workshop was bigger than the one he’d had aboard the Blue Jay, but the Mistletoe was a bigger ship. It had the same computer setup for jump calculations, with a chair surrounded by three massive screens for the view of the stars. It had two desks with regular screens, designed to link to a user’s personal wrist computer. A massive, two person, rune-working bench covered one wall.

  “Right in her sanctum, I suppose.” He felt more than heard Amiri land behind him.

  The combination of the simulacrum chamber and workshop was often referred to as the ‘Mage’s Sanctum’ on merchant ships, though the arrangement was obviously very different on a Royal Martian Navy warship, where the simulacrum chamber controlled the ship’s most powerful weapon – the amplifier – as well as its ability to jump between the stars.

  Damien didn’t respond to Amiri immediately, studying the flows of magic around him. The gravity runes gave off their own slight glow to his eyes, which made it somewhat harder to see if anything was mounted on the walls. He ended up slowly walking the perimeter of the room until he reached the workbench itself.

  There was nothing visible, even to his eyes, but… he pushed on a corner of the bench and it silently folded away, leaving what looked like a blank piece of wall – except to his Sight.

  He studied the magic, the weave of power wound through the silver inlay that concealed itself behind its own power. Without genetics close to the creator’s, even he couldn’t see what was behind the spell. Unlike anyone else, however, he could see the magic itself. How it flowed, how it linked and meshed with reality to change reality.

  “Found something?”

  “Stand back,” he ordered. “There will be an energy release.”

  First, he carefully wove a shield behind the panel – they couldn’t afford to lose the box if it was there. Then, with an exhalation of breath, he ran a tiny blade of fire down the middle of the panel, slashing apart rune after rune until the spell finally collapsed and released its power.

  Without air to carry the energy, there was no sound, but the flash heated the front of his suit to a dangerous level. Warning lights started flashing on the control panel at the bottom of his vision, and he shielded himself from the continued burn.

  After a few moments, the danger passed, and the energy dissipated into the vacuum and the hull. A good chunk of the workbench had been melted, but the panel itself was mostly intact where his magic had protected.

  It was a relatively ordinary looking maintenance access panel, and he popped it open with practiced ease.

  Inside, its status lights still glowing to show its internal power source had not yet failed, was the perfectly standard orange shape of a jump ship black box.

  “Call in your techs, Julia,” he ordered. “Someone far more experienced with computers needs to grab this.”

  Chapter 22

  Once again, Damien and his staff gathered in the main briefing room of the Duke of Magnificence, just down the corridor from the bridge, while Commander Rhine prepared to present what his analysts had pulled together.

  Damien was impressed by how quickly the Duke’s tactical team had opened up and reviewed the data from the Mistletoe Solstice’s black box. Less than twelve hours had passed since he’d broken through the spell the freighter’s crew had used to hide the backup device, but Rhine said his people now had a solid enough idea of what had happened to share.

  The odd man out in the room, sitting separated from the Duke’s officer and Damien and his aides, was Lieutenant Kenneth Mac Duibhshíthe, the Patrol officer the Alan-a-dale had left behind. Mac Duibhshíthe was a gaunt youth with shockingly bright red hair and sunken, exhausted-looking, eyes who hadn’t said more than a dozen words to anyone since coming aboard.

  Rhine stepped up to the front of the room, tapping a command on his wrist PC which brought up an image of Antonius-Sherwood Jump Five, with the Mistletoe Solstice sitting in the middle of it.

  “Some of what I am about to show you is a simulation put together by our computers based on the Mistletoe Solstice’s data,” the Duke’s tactical officer explained. “We were able to resolve more from the data saved on the black box than the Solstice’s computers would have been capable of, but we are working from a civilian ship’s sensors. We are starting roughly ninety-six minutes after the Solstice arrived at Antonius-She
rwood Jump Five.”

  A moment later, the image on the screen started moving. Two jump flares appeared on the screen, slowly resolving into a pair of pyramid shapes that sent a ripple of shocked inhalations around the room.

  Damien watched the destroyers close on the Mistletoe Solstice in grim silence. He wasn’t surprised to see actual warships attack the freighter. He’d been expecting it. A note on the screen showed that time was being accelerated significantly as the ships closed the distance.

  A missile blasted into space, a warning shot that lanced past the front of the Mistletoe Solstice and off into deep space. The freighter continued to run, pushing its engines to a level Damien knew to be punishing to the crew.

  Unfortunately, the warships were equipped with gravity runes and could accelerate faster. They swooped down on the much larger freighter, and multiple three-gigawatt lasers flashed in the void. The engines and rear connectors vanished in a blast of vaporizing titanium, and sections of the screen grew much fuzzier.

  Rhine paused it.

  “At this point, the Solstice lost most of her sensors, especially those at the rear of the ship that would have got the best scan of the warships,” he told his audience. “The destroyers’ approach to the breach they’d opened was only visible on her omnidirectional infrared scanners. Nonetheless, they approached close enough before taking out her sensors to enable our computers to resolve a great many details of the vessels.”

  The wall screen zoomed in on the destroyers, splitting them out and highlighting specific sections.

  “Both Bandit Alpha and Bandit Bravo are Tau Ceti-built Lancer-class destroyers,” Rhine pointed out. “While we probably don’t have enough data to identify individual ships we can, again, identify Tau Ceti Nova Industries batch numbers. Bandit Alpha,” he sighed, then repeated himself. “Bandit Alpha was from TCNI Batch Twenty-Four-Fifty-D. As most of you may remember, that batch of destroyers was purchased in its entirety by the Míngliàng Security Flotilla.”