Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Understood,” the Marine repeated. “We’ll try not to kick down any doors we don’t have to, but if anyone can find your shooter, we will.”

  “Good luck, Mage-Captain.”

  “Likewise, Mage-Captain,” Leary replied to Denis’s smirk. The Marines still figured that rank was more important.

  Another sonic boom caused him to look up again—and his smile vanished as he recognized the blood-red aircraft screeching down from the upper tiers of the Mountain.

  There was only one force in the area that used that color of anything. Only one force equipped with the Hawk-type gunships.

  And even if Denis hadn’t known that, there was only one force in the area that used the red, rune-encrusted suits of exosuit armor that dropped out of the back of the shuttle as it came to a halt above the Sunrise Mall.

  The Royal Guard had arrived.

  There were only three of the red-armored Mages striding through the shattered debris of the mall’s glass roof, but those three were probably more dangerous than the two entire companies of Marines dropped outside. Denis crisply saluted.

  “Guardsmen.”

  “How is he?” the familiar voice of Guardsman Han asked.

  “Shot,” Samara replied crisply. “I’ve staunched the bleeding, but he lost a lot of blood and something seriously messed-up was going on with those godawful runes of his.”

  “Something managed to damage his runes?” Han questioned.

  “I’m not pretending to understand; that’s just what he said,” the MIS Inspector pointed out. “He had me yank the bullet out, then fixed the rune himself before he passed out.”

  “That is not good,” the Guardsman said grimly, kneeling next to the unconscious Hand and producing a medical kit from inside her armor. Her gauntlets retracted, freeing up her hands as she quickly and competently got to work on Montgomery.

  “We need to get him back up to the Mountain quickly,” Han concluded after a few moments. “He’s going to live, but he needs a Mage-Surgeon, not a Combat Mage with battlefield first aid training.”

  She stood back and waved for the gunship to land inside the mall. Her pilot had no hesitation, carefully smashing through the glass in a spot that wouldn’t spray the bodyguards with debris and landing the aircraft next to them.

  “Romanov, I presume you’re with us?” Han asked.

  “Of course,” he agreed. He looked around, a thought hitting him.

  “What happened to the bullet?” Denis asked.

  “I have it,” Samara replied, holding up an evidence bag with a bloodied round in it.

  Of course. She was a cop.

  Then Denis finally remembered why they’d come and looked around.

  “Damn it,” he swore. “We completely forgot about the Keeper!”

  “Go with Han,” Samara told him. “The rest of your team won’t even fit in that chopper, so we’ll sweep the building for the Keeper and see what else we can find. You make sure Montgomery stays alive—we’ll see if we can find out who tried to kill him!”

  “Thank you,” Denis replied.

  “Go!”

  #

  Chapter 22

  Damien woke up feeling like he’d been on the receiving end of a stampede…that had proceeded to urinate in his mouth.

  It wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar feeling, though the last time he’d experienced it, he’d stood off an orbital bombardment and pushed himself into a coma.

  “Please do not attempt to move,” a precise male voice told him before he’d done much more than become aware of his own existence. “Your shoulder is currently immobilized while my work sets.

  “I am Dr. Nguyen,” the speaker continued. “We have met before, though on that occasion, I was taking blood and gene samples, and I have not treated you previously. I am His Majesty’s personal physician, fully briefed on your Runes and your special abilities.”

  “Given that something specifically screwed with my Runes, that’s actually reassuring,” Damien admitted.

  “His Majesty was here while I working on you,” Nguyen replied. “He has checked over your repairs to the Runes of Power and informed me that you should be fully functional. I cannot speak to that, as I do not share your Gift.”

  The doctor paused.

  “The muscles, bones and skin damaged by the bullet, however, I am qualified to speak to. They have healed well under my ministration, though your shoulder will need to remain immobilized for at least another day, and I would prefer you remain in bed rest for at least eight more hours.”

  “How long was I out?”

  “Twelve hours,” Nguyen replied. “I am very good at my job, my lord Hand.”

  “So I see,” Damien confirmed, opening his eyes and blinking against the soft light of the clinic. “Any idea what hit me?”

  “I understand your staff are continuing to sweep the site of the attack,” the Healer told him. “However, you were struck by a fourteen-millimeter metal-jacketed hollow-point sniper bullet. A nasty hit, especially as whatever magical tricks they were playing lodged it in your body.”

  Damien whistled softly. That should have gone right through him without something stopping it. Even his shoulder blade should have fragmented under that impact unless, as Nguyen said, some form of magic had been tied into the bullet.

  The truth was that whatever it had been doing to his Runes had actually been more likely to kill him than the bullet punching through him would have been. Whoever had shot him had known exactly what they were doing. Given everything the Keepers seemed to know about the Hands, he suspected he’d walked right into someone’s neatly set trap.

  They’d used his desire to protect them as bait, and he’d walked right into it.

  “Any update from my staff?” he asked.

  “Special Agent Romanov asked that I inform him as soon as you were awake,” Nguyen admitted. “So long as you promise that you will not attempt to so much as sit up without my assistance and supervision, I will permit them to brief you.”

  Damien sighed. Somehow, he suspected he wasn’t going to win an argument with the man stubborn enough to be responsible for Desmond Alexander’s health.

  “Very well, Doctor. I’ll be good.”

  #

  Nguyen helped Damien into an upright position, the Hand wincing against the pain radiating from his immobilized shoulder. If he’d had any inclination to argue with the doctor, the amount of discomfort involved in sitting up, even with help, would have changed his mind.

  “I’ll send your staff in,” the doctor promised. “I’ll be just outside the door, monitoring your vitals. If I say your briefing is over, my lord Hand, your briefing is over, you understand?”

  “Yes, Doctor,” Damien acquiesced.

  “Good.”

  The doctor swept out of the room in a carefully dramatic flare of his white lab coat, returning a moment later with the mismatched set of Damien’s current trio of senior staff. Romanov held up the middle, as tall and skinny as ever, though he looked almost as tired and abused as Damien felt.

  Samara barely came up to the Marine’s shoulder. She was wearing a light green headscarf today, Damien noted, and he didn’t know her well enough yet to read the flat look in her eyes. He doubted it was good, though.

  Christoffsen just looked…old. Even more so than usual. Weariness exaggerated the lines in Damien’s political advisor’s face, and the Professor was showing his age badly today.

  “None of us look in top form today,” Damien told them. “Are you all all right?”

  “I’m supposed to keep you from getting shot,” Romanov replied. “And you’re worried about us?”

  “I’m alive,” Damien pointed out. “Hurts when I move, a lot, but Dr. Nguyen assures me I will heal quickly. That second shot would have finished me off, Denis. You’re why I’m alive.”

  “You shouldn’t have been shot once,” the Secret Service man said. “We’ve grown so used to being used as a strike team, we’ve st
arted forgetting that, powerful as you are, you have bodyguards for a reason—and snipers and knives in the dark are the reason!”

  “I’m alive,” Damien repeated. “What exactly were you going to do, Denis? Sweep every tower around Sunrise Mall for snipers? Make a big show and dance of what was supposed to be a quiet meeting?

  “No,” he concluded. “We were hit by someone who knew our procedures, knew their target, and wasn’t taking any risks. The Keepers know us far too damned well.”

  “You think they set us up?” Romanov asked.

  “I can’t think of anyone else with the resources and the motive.”

  “I can,” Christoffsen told them grimly. “The Legatans, for one. Hell, Damien, some of His Majesty’s allies would see your ‘unfortunate death in the line of duty’ as removing a lot of obstacles.”

  “Great,” Damien muttered. “Because I need a longer list of suspects.”

  “Whoever did this,” Samara told him, “had a lot of access to our equipment, our protocols, and to magic I haven’t seen before. I can’t say that rules out the Legatans, but the last makes it unlikely.”

  The head-scarfed inspector laid two evidence bags on the table next to Damien. One held a block of circuitry and the other a bloodied bullet.

  “This”—she tapped the circuitry—“is a remote-activated homing beacon. All Civil Fleet vehicles have trackers built in. As a matter of course, the Secret Service disables them and scans for active beacons before allowing one of their principals to take a Civil Fleet vehicle.

  “This beacon was tagged with a radio transmission after we left the Mountain, turning it on after we had scanned for bugs in the car. There was one on both vehicles,” she noted. “Someone was making very sure they would know where you were.”

  “The shooter was on the fortieth floor of an apartment tower,” Romanov explained. “We believe they arrived at the tower after we arrived at the mall, took the elevator up, and then set up in the hallway. The shots were fired from a common-area window. The bullet casings were collected and chemical residue was wiped, but there were still holes in the window.”

  He sighed.

  “The surveillance equipment in the building had been professionally disabled,” he noted. “That helps us pinpoint the shooter’s arrival time but isn’t otherwise useful.”

  “So, they knew which cars we were taking and they knew Secret Service protocol with those cars,” Damien concluded. “Damn. That does suggest Keepers.”

  “So does this,” Samara said, passing him the second bag. “I’m not fully briefed on your abilities, but I understand that you’re one of our better experts on runes. The bullet was covered in silver. A lot of it is damaged, but…”

  He took the bullet and studied it, trying to ignore the fact that chunks of it were still marked with his own blood. As Samara had noted, the runes were damaged but intact enough for him to see the flows of power with his Gift.

  Damien turned it around, studying it from each angle. “Anyone got a magnifying glass?” he asked distractedly.

  “Here,” the Inspector produced a multi-tool from inside her jacket and pulled out the magnifier. “What do you see?”

  He continued studying the runework under the magnifier.

  “I would very much like to meet the Mage who forged this bullet,” he finally concluded aloud. “It’s very fine work; some of the lines are literally as close together as they could be without losing structural integrity.”

  “A Rune Wright’s work?” Romanov asked.

  “No,” Damien said slowly. “And that’s what truly impressive about it. Most highly complex pieces of new runework are created here on Mars by the handful of Rune Wrights the Protectorate has. Those of us who know that tend to forget that it’s entirely possible to craft highly complex and powerful runes and enchantments just using the runic language the first Mage-King created.”

  Or stole. The fact that it was quite possible the early human Mages had stolen the language humanity knew as Martian Runic from someone else was definitely tied into the Keeper’s secrets.

  “This was done with Martian Runic,” he explained. “Very fine, micro-scale runes, but still Martian Runic. It was written by a Rune Scribe, but one with either access to the limited literature on Runes of Power or an actual Rune of Power.”

  “Whoever forged that bullet handed it to someone who tried to kill you, my lord,” Romanov pointed out.

  “Oh, yes,” Damien agreed with a chuckle. “Make no mistake, people: this bullet was enchanted to do one thing and one thing only: kill a Hand. It would work better on myself or another Rune Wright, as it would need to impact close to the Rune, though not necessarily actually sever it as this one did mine.”

  “And what does it do?” Christoffsen asked.

  The other two had watched Damien writhe across the floor with the bullet in him. They could probably guess.

  “It destabilizes the thaumic feedback loop at the core of a Rune of Power,” the Hand explained. “At best, the Hand is forced to manually contain the feedback until someone can yank the bullet out—as happened with me. At worst…”

  Damien sighed.

  “When I first carved a Rune of Power into myself, I was concerned that I would destroy the ship I was on if I got it wrong,” he told his staff quietly. “I overestimated the potential energy release, but not by much. If I had failed to stabilize the Rune, or if Samara hadn’t been there and able to yank the damn thing out, the best-case scenario is that I would have been vaporized.

  “The worst case is that I would have briefly resembled an atomic bomb.”

  The room was silent for a long moment.

  “They knew exactly who and what they were going for,” Samara said grimly. “Except…if it was the Keeper who contacted you, they’d have been more prepared. They’d have known exactly where you were going to be.”

  “That adds to the theory that the people wiping out the Keepers are Keepers,” Damien replied. “Which is…an entirely different layer of nightmare.”

  He sighed, leaning back against the wall.

  “I’m told I need at least eight more hours on bed rest,” he told them. “But we need to find that Keeper. I have a lot of questions and she may be the only person who can answer them.”

  “She disappeared in the evacuation,” Romanov admitted. “I’m sorry, my lord, my priority—”

  “Was my safety and the safety of the civilians,” Damien interrupted. “Which is exactly what it should have been. Once someone was shooting bullets designed to kill Hands, meeting with the Keepers dropped down the priority list.

  “But now we need to find her,” he continued grimly. “Has there been any contact on the channel she used previously?”

  “None,” Romanov told him.

  “Okay. Samara, I’ll need you to start searching through the footage we have of the evacuation. See if you can trace where she went. Otherwise, all we can do is wait.”

  “What about the assassin?” Christoffsen asked.

  “Do we have anything we can trace him with?”

  “No,” Romanov admitted.

  “Then, for now, we leave that in the capable hands of MIS while we deal with the Keepers,” Damien told his people grimly. “I don’t like knowing there’s someone out there taking potshots at me, but for the moment, we need to prioritize answers.

  “And hope that the answers to some of our questions help with the rest.”

  #

  Chapter 23

  “Anything?” Samara asked, but the team she’d left behind shook their heads.

  Denis wasn’t entirely surprised.

  “It was very professional,” Inspector Cook reported over the video link. “Cameras in the building were hit with a virus via the planet-net sixteen seconds after Hand Montgomery and his detail arrived at the mall. One minute, forty-eight seconds later, the cameras themselves were physically disabled at the primary router.

  “The elevators maintain their own records of floors, so I know that
one went from the basement, where the primary router was located, to the fortieth floor seventy-two seconds after the cameras were disabled.

  “The shot was taken two minutes, ten seconds after that elevator reached the fortieth floor. It was almost thirty minutes before the Marine sweep teams hit that building, by which point the area had been wiped for chemical residue and any casings collected.”

  Cook shook his head.

  “If it wasn’t for the hole in the glass, we couldn’t even be certain that this was where the shot was taken from,” he admitted. “I’m guessing we’re looking at two, a shooter and a spotter, but that’s only a guess.

  “We have no evidence on which to assume a specific weapon, no evidence on which to assume any details of the shooter. I’m sorry, Senior Inspector, Special Agent, we have nothing.”

  “Someone shot a Hand and we have nothing?” Samara demanded.

  “I’m not surprised,” Denis told her. “Anyone who knew who they were going after knew how far we’d go to hunt down the people who took the shot. That leaves you with two options for this kind of attack: a sacrifice gambit, with the shooter either knowingly or unknowingly certain to die before arrest, or throw every resource you have at it and get everything right.”

  “They got everything right,” Cook concluded. “And I mean everything. This is the fourth major assassination attempt I’ve run in my career, but I’ve never seen anything this clean before.”

  “They didn’t get everything right,” Samara objected. “Montgomery’s still alive.”

  “Thankfully,” Denis agreed. “Because I doubt we could tear things apart more than we already have, and I’m going to dislike telling Damien we have nothing bad enough. If Damien was dead, I’d be telling the Mage-King we had no idea who killed him.”

  Everyone on the call winced.

  “Do we know anything more about our Keeper?” Samara asked.

  “Yes,” Analyst Daniels replied instantly. “There was enough distortion on the original transmission to prevent us identifying her, but once Hand Montgomery flagged her in the mall’s cameras, we were able to pull enough to get an ID.”