“Somehow, I’m not expecting discount stores and cheap trinkets,” Samara noted as the Runabouts came to a stop in the parking lot.
“No. But if you ever wanted to price-shop between French and Tau Cetan designer clothing, this is the place,” Damien told her. “We’re meeting this Keeper in the food court, at the center of the mall. Let’s move.”
Exiting the vehicles, Romanov studied the area around them.
“This is damned exposed, my lord,” he murmured to Damien. “I doubt that glass is rated for bullets, and I don’t think there’s anywhere in the mall that isn’t visible from some of those rooftops.”
The Hand wished he could pretend his bodyguard was being paranoid.
“Do we have overhead?” he asked.
“Of course,” Romanov confirmed. “Being relayed to my contact lenses. Everything looks clear so far; it just makes me twitchy.”
Damien might generally use his personal detail as a strike force, but their primary job was to keep him alive.
“There isn’t much negotiating with a recording, Denis,” he told his bodyguard gently. “She said she’d meet us here and I doubt we’ll get a second chance.”
“She won’t meet us again?”
“To contact us, she came out of hiding,” Damien said grimly. “I don’t know who’s hunting the Keepers, but I have every reason to suspect they have a lot of reach and knowledge. By meeting us, she’s exposing herself.”
“Right now, I’m feeling exposed,” Romanov replied, gesturing his team out to form a loose cordon around them.
“Keep your eyes open,” Damien ordered. “I don’t think this is a trap, but it wouldn’t be the first one the Keepers have laid for me if it is.”
“It’s very public, my lord.”
“That isn’t necessarily to our advantage.”
“I agree,” Romanov told him. “Sending Massey and his team in first, the rest of us will follow. We’ll maintain a perimeter around you and try not to look like an invading army.”
“Fortunately, the place is full of enough suits, your team should blend in,” Inspector Samara pointed out, looking at the crowd rushing into the mall. “I assume everyone is armed?”
“Penetrator carbines hidden in their suit jackets,” Damien told her. “Designed to punch through exosuits.” He shrugged and clasped his gloved hands together. “I am unarmed, but…”
“He doesn’t need a weapon,” the head of his bodyguard concluded. “Do you have a sidearm, Inspector, or do you need to borrow one?”
Samara smiled and twitched her jacket back, revealing she was wearing a concealed holster with a good-sized pistol tucked under her arm.
“It won’t go through exosuits,” she observed, “but it’s served me well so far.”
“Come on,” Damien ordered. “I want to meet this Keeper and get this whole mess out of sight.”
#
The Marines were doing their best, Damien knew, but they couldn’t help being more obvious than the Secret Service Agents. The two groups he’d absorbed into his bodyguard were cross-training thoroughly, but just as his Marines were better for an exosuit assault on a space ship, his Secret Service Agents were better for covert protection in a mall.
He could pick out his escorts in the crowd easily, but he knew them all by face and gait by now. Hopefully, someone less familiar with the small army of bodyguards he’d brought along would miss the loose circle they formed around him and his core companions.
“We have interface with mall security,” Romanov reported through Damien’s earpiece. “No threats pinging their radar, but they’ve let us into their camera systems. We have eyes on the crowd.”
“Good. Can you sweep for our Keeper friend?” he subvocalized back, studying the crowd around him as they moved up to the second floor and headed towards their food court.
“Running a pattern match now.” Pause. “There are a lot of people in here, boss. I make it at least two thousand in the building. If this goes sideways…”
“We have a real problem,” Damien agreed. “Find our guest for me, Romanov.”
“Scanning.”
They kept moving through the crowd, the circle of bodyguards tightening as the crowds grew denser. Light was flickering down from the skylights and Damien glanced up at the towers around them.
“Ping,” Romanov said sharply. “In the food court, she’s got a table and a plate of fries. Looks like she’s waiting for someone and is an exact match for the images you gave us.”
“As expected,” Damien said, sighing with relief. He’d half-expected this to be a trap. “With me, folks. Let’s go say hi.”
The food court was on the third and highest floor, at the center of the T that made up the mall. Damien took a set of old-fashioned escalators up one more floor and stepped into the naturally lit hall that contained Sunrise Mall’s food court. A ping flickered on his wrist PC, directing him toward their contact.
Stepping through the crowds, he finally saw her himself. Romanov was right. She was definitely the woman who’d sent the recording on Ndosi’s channel, claiming to be the last Keeper.
He opened his mouth to say something—and then the fist of an angry god slammed into his shoulder and everything went black for a moment.
#
Marine or Secret Service, it was never a good sign to have the principal you were protecting go down to the sound of shattering glass and screaming crowds.
Denis Romanov was moving the moment Montgomery went down, his weapon swinging free from under his jacket as he searched for a shooter.
“Cover the Hand!” he snapped, his own magic flaring to life as he wrapped a shield of force around himself and the man he was sworn to protect—just in time for another high-speed bullet to hammer into it with crushing force.
Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion as he felt his spell come apart, the bullet itself insidiously melting the solidified air and magic he’d emplaced to defend Montgomery. The spell, which Romanov had used to stop tank rounds, only bought him a few moments.
Those moments were enough for him to reach Montgomery and yank him across the tiled floor, leaving the second bullet to smash harmlessly into the tiles—with far more force than it should have had after passing through Denis’s spell.
“My lord,” he hissed at Montgomery. “Are you all right?”
The Hand didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. Montgomery was writhing on the floor and the Combat Mage could feel power rippling off him.
Montgomery’s eyes suddenly snapped open and he grabbed Denis’s shoulder.
“They’ve damaged the Runes,” he hissed. “Evac the building.”
A chill ran down Denis’s spine as the full meaning of both the warning and the order sank in. He’d been briefed on the Runes of Power the Hand wore—and the concern of just what would happen if one of them broke, unleashing its thaumic feedback loop in an uncontrolled manner.
“Massey,” Denis snapped at his subordinates. “Coordinate with mall security, start a full evacuation. Coral, perimeter close, now!”
Leaving his subordinates to their work, Denis pulled up another channel.
“Mountain Security Control, this is DM Security Actual,” he said grimly. “The principal is down, wounded by a sniper. I am requesting air and ground support to sweep the surrounding buildings.”
There was a shocked silence on the radio for a moment, and then he heard the controller on the other end swallow.
“Understood, DMS Actual,” the woman replied. “I’ll have aircraft on their way in thirty seconds, ground contingent to follow.
“What is your status?”
“We are evacuating Sunrise Mall and maintaining a perimeter around the principal,” Denis replied. He considered his next words very, very, carefully. “There is a risk of…an extreme thaumaturgic event,” he concluded. “No one is to enter the mall until we confirm the area is safe; do you understand?”
“Agent, that—”
“That is under Han
d Montgomery’s authority,” Denis snapped. “I don’t like it, MSC, but I don’t have a choice. My team is in the zone. Everybody else gets out and nobody else comes in until either I or the Hand say otherwise, understand?”
Silence for a moment.
“Yes, sir. Your air support is en route. What are we looking for?”
Denis looked up, studying the damage in the skylights.
“One shooter, probably with spotter, in a building on the east side,” he reeled off quickly. He paused. “We want them alive, Control. These assholes just shot a Hand.
“We want them alive.”
#
Damien’s world was pain.
He wasn’t quite sure just what he’d been shot with, but it was interfering with his Runes of Power. The feedback loop was…leaking.
Sparks of power kept escaping from his Runes, and the normally contained flow of power was now backlashing into his body at random intervals, feeling exactly like he was being repeatedly electrocuted.
He was only vaguely aware of telling Romanov to get everybody out as he twitched in pain, his shoulder slamming into the tile floor, bruising his skin and shattering the ceramic underneath him. The fragments of tile tore into his suit, only the armor weave keeping his skin intact as his own magic tried to kill him.
Releasing some of the power would help but only at the cost of destroying part of the building and potentially killing innocents…and that was if he maintained control of it. He could tell that he was running far too close to the edge of completely losing control.
An uncontrolled feedback loop would, at a minimum, destroy the entire damned mall. Quite possibly a good chunk of the city. The Rune Wrights were careful designing the Runes of Power; it shouldn’t be possible for the loop to be damaged like this.
A hand settled on his shoulder and he tried to jerk away from the touch, only for the grip to tighten and hold him in place.
“How can I help?” Munira Samara asked softly, using her body to shield his eyes from the light as he looked up at her.
“Bullet. Shoulder. Interrupting the rune,” he gasped, then spasmed in pain and yanked himself from her grip.
“Right,” she replied. “Guessing you’ve got to stay conscious?”
“Lose control…everybody dies.”
“Inshallah,” Samara whispered, stepping into him and using her knee to pin him to the ground. It hurt, but compared to the lightning rippling through his body, the sharp pressure of her knee driving him into the tile floor barely registered.
He was losing control, the waves of power rippling through him more frequently and his awareness of the world fading in and out with it. He barely registered Samara producing a knife from somewhere and cutting away the wreckage of his suit while she carefully judged.
“I’d warn you this will hurt,” she told him, “but I think we’re out of time.”
Damien felt the knife slice into his skin. The bullet wasn’t just on the surface; it was embedded in his skin and shoulder blade, stuck in place in a way that could not be normal.
Samara cut the bullet out. Probably along with a good chunk of his flesh, but Damien barely registered that compared to the flash of uncontrolled power that ran through him as the bullet yanked free of the Rune of Power it had embedded itself in the middle of.
There was no containing it this time—but there was, now, a chance to control it. Damien flung his arm upward, pointing away from Samara, away from the Secret Service troopers, away from the surrounding towers…and channeled pure magic.
Every molecule in a pillar six centimeters across and a kilometer high suddenly flashed to plasma, hyper-compressing and accelerating with heat as his power tore through the air.
A second wave of power, this one fully under his control, followed. His magic encased and contained the inevitable explosion, sending it farther into the air as his burst of uncontrolled energy became a pillar of light and fire easily ten kilometers tall.
But Samara, only twenty centimeters away from it, was unharmed.
Damien inhaled, sucking in surprisingly cool air as another ripple of uncontrolled power tore through him. This one was weaker. Without the bullet embedded in his skin, his Rune was damaged but wasn’t actively being distorted.
“Stand back,” he told Samara.
“I just cut a hole in you,” she snapped. “You need medical attention.”
“Not yet. Stand back,” he ordered.
Thankfully, she obeyed, and Damien closed his eyes, focusing on the flow of power through his skin, testing the channels, the runes, the silver polymer.
The Rune of Power on his right shoulder had been severed in two places, but the bullet had clearly carried runes that had been actively distorting it. Without the runes on the bullet, the Rune was still broken, but it wasn’t attacking him.
A broken Rune of Power was bad enough. Uncontrolled power continued to ripple through him, and he was quite sure it would kill him very, very quickly if not stopped.
With his eyes closed, he found the broken ends, where the bullet had snapped the almost indestructible silver polymer inlaid into his skin…and then melted them again, pulling the strings of molten metal out of his skin and linking them again across the bloody gash in his flesh.
The ends joined. Thinner than they had been, but they were connected again, and the ripples of power slowly, ever so slowly, faded.
Damien opened his eyes, looking up at the terrified face of his newest subordinate.
“All right, Munira,” he half-whispered. “Now you can do first aid.”
Then he passed out.
#
Chapter 21
“Where’s my air support?” Denis snapped into his radio, staring up at where a neat hole had been vaporized through the roof of the building by a multi-kilometer line of fire. “Please tell me no one got caught in that.”
“Air above you was clear,” a new voice replied. “This is Colonel Adam Tsukuyomi, commanding officer of Air Defense Squadron Seven. I have four interceptors dropping into high-altitude cover and eight helicopter gunships moving in low and fast.”
Tsukuyomi paused.
“What the hell was that, Agent Romanov?”
“As soon as the Hand is conscious enough to ask, I’ll ask,” Denis told the Colonel, glancing over at where Inspector Samara was beginning to bind up the gaping hole in Montgomery’s shoulder. “Montgomery was shot by a long-range sniper. They took two shots that I’m aware of, using some kind of runic round that went clean through my thaumic defenses.”
“I can sweep for hostiles, but I can’t track down a runner with gunships and jet fighters, Agent,” Tsukuyomi warned.
“There should be boots coming from on high,” the Hand’s bodyguard replied. “Watch out for falling shuttles and keep in the loop; it’s looking like this was a one-shot deal, but I’d have arranged a second wave if I was going after a Hand.”
“Understood, Agent Romanov,” the Air Defense officer replied. “We are in position above you and available on this channel if you need fire from above. I’m not reading any moving aircraft, and the only thing of any threat I’ve seen so far was that lovely pillar of fire.”
“Thank you, Colonel.”
Romanov shook his head at the circumstances that resulted in his effectively giving orders to a Colonel, a man who outranked him by several dozen kilometers in military terms, then switched over to the Marine Corps channel.
“This is Special Agent Romanov,” he barked. “I was promised boots on the ground here. What’s the ETA?”
“Six shuttles bearing two companies of Marines just detached from the battleship Song of Justice,” he was calmly informed. “They’ll be on the ground in two minutes. It’s going to be a rough ride.”
“I have a Hand down and critically wounded,” Denis pointed out. “The shooter is still out there. I need those boots.”
Silence.
“They’ll be on the ground in seventy seconds,” the flight controller said grimly. “Just
don’t expect any of those boys and girls to buy you beer.”
“All I want them to do is find the son of a bitch who shot my charge,” Denis replied. “We have the Hand secure.”
“We’ve been informed medevac is coming from the Mountain,” the other Marine replied. “Should be there just after the Marines.”
“Understood. Thank you.”
“All part of the service. Just not a service we want to be providing.”
#
Thunder echoed in the sky as the assault shuttles rode pillars of fire down from orbit. Landing in an inhabited area, they would normally avoid full-tilt assault landings. With a Hand down and potentially bleeding out, and a sniper on the loose, those niceties were thrown aside.
Sonic booms echoed through the city, rattling the damaged window panes above Denis as the shuttles hammered their rockets to land safely at the last moment. The map being fed to his contact flashed with new icons as five of the shuttles dropped into a perfect pentagram pattern around the mall. The sixth dropped into the mall parking lot, Marines spilling out of all six spacecraft to begin establishing a perimeter.
“We’re on the ground, Special Agent,” a voice said in his ear. “This is Mage-Captain Alistair Lear, senior officer on the deck. Perimeter is in progress; what are we looking for?”
“Lear, this is Romanov,” Denis greeted him. “I wish I could give you more clarity, but we have no idea what we’re looking at. Minimum of one shooter, took a shot from one of the towers on the east side of Sunrise Mall with a high-caliber rifle.”
“Can you send me an image of the impact zone?” Leary asked. “We’ll backtrack as best we can. No sonics?”
“Image on the way,” Denis told him. “No sonics,” he confirmed. “Either too far away or well silenced; I’m guessing on the former—those towers are tall.”
“Understood.” Leary paused. “Orders are to take the bastard alive, I take it?”
Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5) Page 15
