Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  The image on the screen of Daniels and Cook slid to one side, replaced with a standard government identification photo.

  “Miss Eleanor Meir,” Daniels concluded. “Thirty-two. Member of none of our identified groups, but works as a senior librarian and research analyst at Olympus City University. She hasn’t flagged anything on our records—she’s not a Mage, not involved in any political groups, not even a speeding ticket.

  “Miss Meir is a model citizen,” the Analyst said. “She also went through university with Lawrence Octavian. Several, though by no means a majority, of her research grants were funded by the Octavian Foundation—though I have to point out that the Foundation funds just over a thousand research grants a year on Mars alone.”

  “So, she had an existing relationship with him, one he leveraged to bring her into the Keepers,” Samara guessed. “Do we know where she is?”

  “She’s currently on vacation, but she might be home. According to her address on file with the University, she rents an apartment in one of the old dome districts,” Daniels replied. “Should I have OCPD investigate?”

  “Negative,” Romanov snapped. He checked the time. “The Hand is still down for at least four more hours, but I think we need to move on this immediately.

  “Inspector Samara, would you care to accompany me and one of my teams on a house visit?”

  She smiled grimly.

  “Of course, Special Agent. We even still have those Runabouts—and I guarantee you they aren’t bugged this time.”

  #

  The building the address brought them to was nicer than Denis had been expecting, a ten-story structure of carefully painted and shaped concrete that probably dated from after when the dome had been taken down.

  It was still shaped inside the curve of the nonexistent dome. That was just how the dome districts on Mars worked, and no one argued with two-hundred-plus years of tradition now.

  “Research professor pays better than I expected,” the Marine muttered to Samara as they stopped the electric SUV and his Secret Service agents swarmed out.

  “That depends,” she replied, looking the building up and down. “I’m betting she’s in a one-bedroom on the sixth floor. Plus, she rents and this is a co-ownership building, which means she probably can’t afford to own.”

  Denis checked the address.

  “Fifth floor,” he pointed out. “But you’re probably right. Massey, are we in the BMS yet?”

  The Building Management System in every apartment building on Mars had overrides built into it for police, firefighters and Hands to take over control as needed.

  “We are,” the Corporal confirmed. “But…”

  “What?”

  “Hallway cameras are down,” Massey reported. “I’m getting minimal reports from the building systems, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone accessing the systems.”

  “Shit. Massey, take Coral and Earhart, sweep the security station. The rest of you, with me. We’re taking the stairs.”

  The team split up with the ease of both practice and adrenaline, all six of them moving through the building’s front door at a brisk pace. They were far enough into the BMS that the doors simply swung open for them as they approached, a map dropping down on Denis’s contacts as he headed in.

  “Stairs are this way,” he barked, leading Samara and his last Secret Service Agent towards the side door and drawing his own weapon.

  Marines, MIS and Secret Service alike did enough exercise to make four flights of stairs a trivial challenge, but it still took time. Massey made it to the control room first and pinged them.

  “There was a janitor and a security guard on duty,” the Marine Corporal informed them. “Both are dead—necks snapped.”

  “Time of death?”

  Massey sighed.

  “At least two, three hours ago, boss. I’m not sure what you’re going to find upstairs, but I doubt it’s going to be good.”

  Denis left that unanswered as he shoved the door open onto the fifth floor, his carbine barrel leading the way.

  “Hallway clear,” he reported. “Move up.”

  “I’ve got a broken door,” Samara told him a few moments later. She paused. “It’s Meir’s.”

  “Move up, move up,” Denis snapped to his Secret Service agent. “Do we have any signs of life?”

  “Negative,” the agent replied, checking a scanner mounted on her wrist. “I’ve no movement or human-sized thermals on this floor.” She pointed down the hallway. “Two cats in the apartment at the end, a dog over here. That’s it.”

  It was the middle of the day. Hopefully, that just meant everyone was at work.

  Either way, the threat level was low, so Denis moved forward himself, stepping past the kicked-in wreckage of Eleanor Meir’s front door to survey the professor’s apartment.

  As Samara had guessed, it was a small single-bedroom suite, crammed full of the miscellaneous possessions most adults managed to accumulate if they weren’t careful. There was bric-a-brac, paper, a fixed computer screen to link into a wrist PC…

  All of it was wrecked and scattered. The front room had been ripped apart, even the couch cushions slashed apart to make sure nothing was hidden inside them. Paper and books were everywhere.

  “Check the bedroom if you please, Inspector Samara,” Denis asked.

  The MIS Inspector nodded, stepping through the door into the other room to look around. She stepped back out and shook her head.

  “She’s not here. Her room is in the same shape as the rest of this”—she gestured around—“but it looks like she slipped out before whoever did this arrived.”

  #

  Damien sighed and nodded as Romanov finished his report.

  “Thank you, Denis,” he told the other man. “Is there any sign of where she may have gone?”

  “We’ll check,” the Marine replied, “but I imagine if there was, whoever ransacked the place will already be on their way.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Damien admitted. “I’ll try and reach out to her again, but if she isn’t willing to talk to us, we’re running out of options.”

  Romanov snorted.

  “I’m getting used to that feeling, boss. Behind the ball and sprinting at the wrong side of the curve,” he told Damien. “Not sure I like the feeling.”

  “I know I don’t. Check to see if you can find anything at her apartment and then get back here,” Damien instructed. “I have a feeling we’ll be moving sooner rather than later.”

  “Wilco, my lord.”

  Damien closed the channel with another sigh. He was still restricted to his bed on Dr. Nguyen’s orders, and he couldn’t even argue particularly hard. Movement was better than it had been when he woke up, but it still hurt.

  Nonetheless, he’d pulled enough rank to get his computer returned to him. It sat on his lap instead of his wrist, but he could still use it with his uninjured arm.

  He pulled up the channel and protocols the Keeper had reached out to him on and activated them.

  “Miss Meir,” he said into the camera. “I am giving you the benefit of the doubt and presuming you had nothing to do with the assassination attempt on me. If that’s the case, then you are running right now.

  “We know who you are. So do your enemies. Someone other than us has ransacked your apartment. If there were any clues there as to where you went, they’re coming after you now.

  “My reach is long, but it is not infinite and we are not omniscient. I can’t help you unless I know where you are.” He paused. “Help me help you, Miss Meir. I swear to you, by the honor of the Mage-King of Mars, that you will not be harmed.”

  He stopped recording and transmitted. He wasn’t even sure if Meir could receive on those protocols—it depended on just how much Ndosi had given her.

  But if the Keeper didn’t reach out to him…there was nothing left for him to do.

  #

  Damien had finally managed to drift off into an only somewhat painful slumber when
the computer resting in his lap chimed and vibrated, jerking him awake with another spasm through his injured shoulder.

  Groggily blinking away sleep, he hit ACCEPT—and a recorded message started playing, popping up a now-familiar dark-haired woman.

  “Lord Montgomery,” Eleanor Meir greeted him formally. “I received your message. To be honest, I expected you to blame me for the ambush, though I swear I had nothing to do with it.

  “Regardless, though, I have nowhere left to turn. I was aware my home had been raided,” she admitted. “From the moment I came out to meet you, I knew I could not return there. I have retreated to a safehouse Octavian had set aside for me, but I fear that all of the Keeper safehouses have been compromised.

  “There is nowhere left for me to turn but to you. I will answer all of your questions, Lord Montgomery. My oaths would require me to regardless.

  “But I must ask you to save me,” she concluded, then reeled off an address.

  “I do not know how long it will take our enemies to find me,” she warned. “They could be breaking down the outer defenses as you listen. I have nowhere else to turn.

  “Help me, Hand Montgomery. You are my only hope.”

  The screen shut down, the hologram disappearing as Damien stared at the computer, then checked the time.

  He was supposed to be on bed rest for another hour, but he was out of time. He paged Dr. Nguyen.

  “You should be asleep,” the doctor told him, but something in the way he regarded Damien said everything.

  “I have to go,” Damien replied. “Duty calls.”

  Nguyen shook his head.

  “I have treated a King and nine Hands in my time here,” he noted. “You are all the same.”

  “I’m not exaggerating,” Damien pointed out.

  “I know,” Nguyen told him. “Hold still.” A hypodermic appeared from somewhere in the lab coat and stabbed into Damien’s flesh just beneath the cast immobilizing his shoulder.

  “That will block the pain,” the doctor continued. “The cast will keep your shoulder in place, stop you from doing too much damage. Try not to get in any fistfights. Do not let the drugs fool you—you are weak and your magic is undermined by it. If you are not careful, you could easily injure yourself further by both magical and physical exertion.”

  “Thank you,” Damien said.

  “Like I said, you are all the same,” Nguyen told him. “I have learned when I can be stubborn and when duty must call. Go!”

  Damien carefully rose from the bed, testing the limits of his shoulder as the doctor helped him into his clothes. He couldn’t move much, but he could move.

  Even weakened, there were few threats he wouldn’t back his magic against.

  #

  Chapter 24

  Damien met his people at the assault shuttle, Romanov and Samara having barely returned from their trip into town to check on Meir’s apartment.

  “Isn’t this a bit of overkill?” Samara asked, looking over the armed spacecraft behind him.

  “I have the feeling we’re going to want every bit of firepower we can scrape together shortly,” Damien told her. “Romanov, I called the regular detail together; they’re going to be arriving over the next couple of minutes. As soon as we have the team assembled, we’re going to be in the air. I want the Secret Service Agents fully kitted out and the Marines in exosuit armor.”

  Romanov nodded.

  “You think it’s going to get that bad?” he asked.

  “I hope not,” Damien admitted, “but so far, we’ve been arriving too damned late and too damned short to make a difference. This time, I want to go in fast and loaded for bear.”

  “It’ll take us at least five minutes to get the Marines in armor,” Romanov pointed out.

  “That’s about how long the pilot said it will take us to get there, so I suggest you get started,” Damien replied.

  #

  As soon as Damien saw the vehicles, he knew they’d lost the race. The safehouse, like the one they’d found Professor Raptis in, was a large older house in a suburb. The four SUVs out front stood out like a sore thumb…but the small surface-to-orbit shuttle was completely out of place.

  “Take that shuttle out,” he snapped. “The cars, too. If I’m wrong, I’ll happily replace someone’s wheels, but I’m pretty sure those are our hostiles.”

  “Done,” the pilot replied crisply.

  A moment later, a panel on the bottom of the assault shuttle opened up and five missiles blasted away. The shuttle and SUVs erupted in fireballs as the weapons struck home, shattering the vehicles and the ground underneath them alike.

  “Marines first,” Romanov barked. “Slow down and drop us out, then sweep back for second wave deployment.”

  “Roger.”

  The Special Agent’s armored finger swung around to point directly at Damien.

  “And you, my lord, go in the second wave. Clear?”

  “Clear,” Damien replied meekly.

  “Good.”

  The shuttle swept across the neighborhood ten meters above the ground, still traveling at well over a hundred kilometers an hour when Romanov led the rest of the exosuited Marines out the back of the shuttle, falling like homesick meteors to the shattered ground below.

  Damien tried to keep a watch on the situation, but the shuttle continued on in a wide sweeping turn that would bring them back onto the ground in a few moments.

  “We are under fire,” Romanov reported calmly. “Nothing that’s a threat to exosuits yet, but we’re moving in to suppress hostiles.”

  “You’ll be on the ground in sixty seconds,” the pilot told Damien. “Hang on.”

  Acceleration pressed him to the side of his chair as the shuttle turned, continuing to slow as the pilot brought the spacecraft towards the open street.

  “Man down,” Romanov reported. “Two men down, shit! They’ve switched to carbines with penetrator rounds. Go suppressive! Suppressive!”

  Fire lit up the street as the shuttle swept around, and Damien caught himself holding his breath. They needed to rescue Meir, not level the building, but…

  “Pilot, relay from Romanov’s suit scanners, hit the hostiles he designates with the guns as you drop us.”

  There was no response for a long moment, then the two railguns mounted on the shuttle’s nose opened up. Short bursts, maybe half a dozen rounds at a time, walked across the front of the house. The façade came apart in flaming chunks of wood and concrete as the thirty-millimeter shells carved their way across.

  “Fire is suppressed,” Romanov reported as the shuttle came to a halt. “We need to move. The interior shell is armored and I doubt we got them all.”

  #

  Damien was the first out of the shuttle after it touched down, a shield of force moving with him as he charged through the burning wreckage of the SUVs to meet up with Romanov.

  The Marine was as ducked behind one of the wrecked vehicles as it was possible for a man in an exosuit to be, his armored body quivering with rage.

  “They’ve got penetrator carbines and an unknown number of troops,” he reported shortly. “Kaber and Alstairs are dead. Whoever the fuck these people are, they have damn good guns and are damn good shots.”

  “Fuck them,” Damien replied. “We have two Mages. Tactical shields?”

  “Read my mind, my lord.”

  The Hand smiled grimly, moved his shield forward and extended it to cover the front of the remaining detail. A twitch of power turned the shield translucent, visible to the men behind him.

  “Advance by sections under cover of the shields!” Romanov barked.

  The Marine suited actions to words, moving forward from the wrecked vehicle behind the shields. His Marines fell in with him, sweeping for targets as they moved into the wreckage of the house. Finally reaching the edge of the original façade, they took what cover they could, and Romanov waved Damien forward.

  The Hand waited a moment to be sure the Combat Mage had his own shield up, and then
moved forward, carefully, towards the shattered house, Samara and the Secret Service Agents on his heels.

  The bombardment from the shuttle had wrecked the exterior section of the house, leaving the armored shell at the core completely obvious. There were bodies scattered through the debris, the men who’d tried to hold off Romanov’s people.

  They were…more intact than Damien would have expected, but he didn’t have time to try and follow the mental alert that raised.

  “Find the entrance,” he ordered.

  “Based off last time, it’s over here,” one of the Marines replied, poking at a chunk of wall in what had been the kitchen. It resisted and then swung open as she yanked on it.

  Gunfire echoed out from behind the metal door. The range was so short, the rounds punched through the shield Romanov had raised in front of the Marine—but the shield absorbed enough force that the penetrator rounds bounced off her armor as she dodged backward, firing her own weapon.

  Damien was only a moment behind the Marine, a stronger shield slamming into place to deflect the next burst of rounds. The two shooters were still up somehow, despite one of them have a very large hole blown through their midsection.

  Fire flashed from his fingers, arcing across the room behind his companions’ bullets. The two attackers were still up, still shooting, and his shield fractured under the pressure. The point Marine was flung back, her armor still absorbing the shots as she and her attackers all went down.

  “Son of a bitch,” Romanov swore. “Cora, are you okay?”

  “Armor is jammed up,” the Marine reported. “I’m fine, but this suit is trashed and I’m stuck.”

  “What were those fuckers?”

  Damien shook his head as he stepped into the interior, looking down at the bodies but already suspecting what he would find.

  There were the blood and charred flesh you would expect from someone killed by bullets and Mage-fire. There were also sparking wires and shattered circuitry woven into their bodies.