Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  Now that he was inside it, however, he could see the runes themselves. A regular Mage, trained in reading and modifying Martian Runic, could have read through the matrix and carefully calculated the points to severe it to render it safe.

  It would take days to weeks, but it was doable.

  Damien, however, studied the flows of magic through the silver and slashed out with his magic after a few minutes. The matrix was complex, intentionally woven to prevent it being broken in only a handful of places…but a few dozen severed links later and the wall around the door was safe.

  Another few minutes and the kitchen was safe. Then the balcony door.

  Then he carefully stepped into the bedroom and safed the last wall, and checked to be sure that the wall and floor matrices were disabled by the removal of the rest.

  Finally able to breathe comfortably, he opened a channel to his staff.

  “From the lack of explosion, I’m guessing things went according to plan?” Romanov asked.

  “So far, so good,” Damien agreed. “The matrix is disabled, the energy bled off. The apartment should be safe to enter.” He looked around. “I’m not seeing much in terms of paperwork, but there’s a wall screen and attached console if nothing else. Hopefully, Samara and her people can pull something out of it.”

  “If he used it at all, we’ll get something,” the MIS Inspector promised. “We’ll be there in five minutes.”

  #

  Damien very carefully did not touch anything while his investigators and forensics people were on their way, inspecting the plain apartment judiciously after opening the front door.

  There really wasn’t much to it. It wasn’t entirely obvious that this wasn’t somewhere heavily lived in—some people simply had austere tastes—but the complete lack of any kind of entertainment or personal effects in the one-bedroom suite was definitely a hint.

  Other than the runes that had encased the entire unit in magical defenses, there was no more magic or runework in the apartment. Whoever Kay was, he apparently wasn’t the type to make a dozen small magical items to handle minor conveniences.

  “Huh. This isn’t quite what I was expecting,” Samara admitted as she strode through the door, a trio of gloved forensics techs on her heels. “I mean, I wasn’t expecting a slaughterhouse with plastic on the floors or anything, but this is so…”

  “Mundane?” Damien suggested. “This guy is responsible for a lot of death and destruction, including two people he’s killed right in front of me. Feels like his home should have a few more skulls and spikes.”

  The head-scarfed investigator chuckled and turned to her techs.

  “Roland, check the bedroom,” she snapped. “Biological samples, fingerprints, the works. If he’s slept here, we should be able to pull enough to identify him from the RMMC records.

  “Aristides, you’ve got the console and the wallscreen,” she continued. “Strip the drives, strip the records. I want to know every file he’s looked at on the device and every call he’s made. Assume he’s wiped them, start on the deep layers.

  “Ylka, start in the kitchen and move out from there. General sampling, testing, and checking. Books, cereal brands, anything you can find, tag it for analysis.”

  The techs split to their assigned chores, and Damien saw Romanov slip through the door after the MIS people.

  “We’ve relaxed the perimeter and allowed people back into most of the buildings,” the Marine told them. “I’m keeping this building locked down, regular cops on the ground floor and Marines and Secret Service on this one. We have orbital fire support and a drop battalion standing by if things go sideways.”

  “That shouldn’t be necessary at this point,” Damien replied.

  “I agree,” Romanov said, “but I’m not standing them down until you’re back in the damned Mountain, my lord. We almost lost you once; I will not risk that happening again. I am not explaining to His Majesty that I let you get killed.”

  Damien gestured around the empty apartment.

  “I’m in so much danger from the cheap Swedish furniture,” he replied. “I quiver in the expensive shoes the Chancellor bought me.”

  “Just because we know there are no more traps here doesn’t mean Kay doesn’t have an alert for a sniper to set up across the way if someone goes into his apartment!” his bodyguard snapped. “My job is to keep you alive. Don’t make it harder than you have to.”

  With a sigh, Damien nodded, stepping carefully out of the line of sight from the window.

  “Fair enough, Denis,” he allowed. “I’m not trying to be difficult.”

  “If you were trying to be difficult, I’d quit,” the Marine told him bluntly. “I have to let you do things like teleport into the middle of a bomb. I don’t have to stand down your backup when you’re still in a hazard zone.”

  “We’re not leaving until Samara’s people have finished taking this place apart.”

  “Then the Navy and the Corps are on standby until then.”

  #

  “Most of what we’re doing here is just sampling,” Samara warned Damien as they waited in the hallway. “It’ll take time in the lab—hours, if not days—for us to be able to pull anything from the deep layers of storage on the wallscreen or to ID him from the biological samples he’ll have left behind. There isn’t going to be a magic bullet here, my lord. There’s not much point in you waiting around.”

  “There’s also not much point in my being anywhere else,” Damien pointed out. “But I know. I’m not expecting miracles.”

  “If he is—or even was—a Marine, we’ll know who he was pretty quickly,” she promised. “I’m not sure how much that will help us, but we’ll be able to ID him.”

  “Knowing who he is helps a lot,” he noted. “It gives us a starting point for where he may have been recruited. It’ll also tell us where he was assigned if he was still on active duty—twenty Combat Mages died in the Archive and we haven’t had them come up missing on any of the Mars bases yet.

  “So, they had to be assigned somewhere, and somewhere where they haven’t been reported missing yet,” he concluded. “I want to know what that assignment is, because it gives us somewhere to look for other Keepers we might have missed.”

  “Ma’am, my lord,” Aristides Ferro stepped out of the apartment. “You need to see this.”

  “You found something?” Samara asked.

  “Most of it was wiped,” the tech confirmed as he led them back into the room. “I pulled full copies of everything on the disks before I touched anything, so we should be able to retrieve at least something later on.”

  Picking up the long black box of electronics he had linked into the half-dismantled wallscreen, Ferro smiled.

  “The official recording functions were disabled, but a call was relayed through this unit shortly before the incident in Olympus City.”

  “If it was relayed, was anything saved here?” Damien asked.

  “No, but I had enough metadata to trace the call in the planetary net buffers,” the tech replied. “We were lucky. Another few hours and we’d only have been able to retrieve fragments.”

  “You got the call?” Damien knew that the data buffers that fed a planetwide communication network held and processed a lot of data, and bits of it inevitably—and, he understood, somewhat intentionally—ended up being held for as much as twenty-four to forty-eight hours afterwards.

  “Most of it, I think,” Ferro confirmed. “I haven’t played it; I figured you’d want to see.”

  “Show me,” Damien ordered.

  The tech tapped a command on his unit and the wallscreen turned on with the image of a pale-skinned, eerily tall man. He wasn’t speaking, so presumably the voice that started was Kay’s.

  “…not my problem if your people stuffed their heads into a meat grinder,” he was saying. “All we promised you was ships and guns.”

  “You would break your sworn word to the Stone and the Void, the Alpha and the Omega?” the man in the image demanded. Hi
s voice sounded familiar to Damien, gravelly with the leftovers of vacuum exposure. “We have been betrayed before; we will not tolerate it again, ‘Nemesis’.”

  The image reduced to static for a few moments, and Ferro shook his head when Damien looked at him. That part was lost.

  “…provided the ships,” Kay was saying when the video returned. “We gave you the target. We didn’t have the timing of the Hand’s trip in advance.”

  “The guns you gave us were worse than useless! He turned them on our own ships!”

  “He’s a fucking Hand. I warned you what the limitations of those toys were, ‘Alpha’.” More static. “…bullied. We are allies, nothing more.”

  “I need replacement ships and guns,” the asteroid miner snapped. “I can find men, but without ships and guns, they can do nothing.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Kay told him.

  “You lie,” the other man replied. “Like the Nemesis who came before. We are a tool to you! You will see! The Stone and the Void will bring fire such as you have never seen.”

  The miner smiled coldly.

  “You are not our only ally, Nemesis, and your aid not our only sword. You will learn.”

  The screen turned dark.

  “That was the end of the message,” Ferro reported. “There were significant time gaps as well, but the buffer drops those first as minimum-value content.”

  “Can you trace the origins?” Damien asked.

  The tech paused thoughtfully.

  “Yes,” he concluded. “The off-planet side would have had to come in via an orbital satellite; we can trace it back and get a vector of origin. It may take some time,” he warned.

  “Do it,” Damien ordered. “If Kay—or ‘Nemesis’ or whatever name he’s using this time—went anywhere in Sol, the BLF appear to be his only remaining allies, however strained the relationship.”

  “I wouldn’t go to them if I were him,” Samara said.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he agreed. “That said…” He waved at the screen. “Those people already almost took out a multi-billion-dollar refinery ship. Who knows what they’ll try next?

  “They know something about Kay, which means I need to go ask them questions. If I happen to neutralize a dangerous terrorist group along the way, I’m not seeing the disadvantage here.”

  #

  Chapter 28

  Returning to the Mountain, Damien found himself once again being greeted by a red-armored Royal Guardsman. This time, Dr. Christoffsen was standing with her, and the worried expression on his political advisor’s face sent a chill down the Hand’s spine.

  “Guardsman Han, Doctor,” he greeted them warmly as he approached the exit from the landing pad. “The Professor looks like he’s seen a ghost.” He nodded toward Christoffsen. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing good, Damien,” his aide replied. “You and I have a meeting with His Majesty in about twenty minutes. Guardsman Han came along to make sure we both made it.”

  Damien swallowed. That kind of urgency was never a good sign—especially if Christoffsen wasn’t willing to give him details.

  “The Council?” he asked.

  “His Majesty wanted to brief you himself,” his aide replied, and Damien nodded.

  “All right.” He gestured Romanov and Samara to him. “Romanov, you’re with me. Samara, get in touch with your people and expedite tracing that location. If I’m not able to go after the BLF, I want enough data to send the Navy after them.”

  “Of course, my lord,” she replied. “I’ll make it happen.”

  His bodyguard stepped up beside him in silence and Damien turned back to Christoffsen.

  “All right, Professor. Lead the way.”

  #

  He wasn’t sure if it was a good sign or a bad one that Guardsman Han led them to the very top of the Mountain, to the Mage-King’s private office. At least whatever was going on wasn’t, yet, a public affair.

  Han led Damien and his two companions into the office and then stepped back against the wall. Desmond Michael Alexander the Third stood against the window, his hands crossed behind his back as the gaunt man, seeming far older than he usually did, stared out over the Martian surface.

  “Han, Romanov, Christoffsen,” Alexander said slowly. “Leave us.”

  Apparently, the appointment wasn’t to include Damien’s political advisor after all. In this room, there was no question of authority. Damien’s staff bowed their way out after the armored Guardsman, letting the door close behind them and leaving the Hand alone with his King.

  Alexander continued to stare out the window in silence for a long time, and for the first time since he’d met his King, it truly sank in to Damien just how old the ruler of humanity was. He was well into his second century and had ruled the Protectorate for over three times as long as Damien had been alive.

  “My liege?” he said questioningly.

  “I have no answers for you, Damien,” Alexander said quietly to the window. “Only warnings and premonitions of the end of an era. It is not given, even to my bloodline, to see the future or the past with true clarity.”

  Damien wasn’t sure just what the King was talking about, so he waited in silence.

  “I have…journals,” the Mage-King continued, “written by my grandfather. Not all of them—he wrote them for most of his life but destroyed many to prevent even his heirs knowing his true thoughts.

  “But I know that he wove magic to try and see into the future, to predict the consequences of his actions and guide the creation of the Charter and the nation it defined.”

  Alexander shook his head.

  “Even if his journals hadn’t told me he failed, I would have guessed by where we ended up,” he concluded. “I can see the logic behind every piece of the Compact and the Charter, and yet the very documents that define the nation I am sworn to rule and defend lay out the fracture lines that will inevitably destroy it.

  “No caste system or aristocracy has survived the centuries with its power intact. Humanity kneels poorly as a whole. Setting the Mages apart was necessary to protect them then, but it created the threat we face now.”

  “My lord?” Damien questioned again.

  “Maybe we could have changed things safely when I became King,” Alexander told him. “Perhaps my father could have slowly reshaped the Protectorate over his life. I fear it’s too late now. The Protectorate will not be reborn around a conference table. I fear the reforms we need will now be bought with blood.”

  “My liege,” Damien repeated, “you’ve lost me. What’s going on?”

  Alexander leaned his head against the window, not glass but magically transmuted steel, and exhaled a long sigh.

  “The Council of the Protectorate has formally requested that I appear before them,” he replied. “While I have been given no official notification of what they want, there are enough loyalists among the Councilors that I know nonetheless.

  “Those who would make the Council a formal legislature have made the alliance we feared with the UnArcana worlds. You are a hero who has saved the Protectorate, but they intend to condemn you and demand your resignation—not truly for your actions but because they see an opportunity to weaken the Mountain.”

  “This is not the only way I can serve,” Damien pointed out quietly, watching his King slump against the window with concern. “If I resign, it would short—”

  “No,” Alexander snapped. “I will not be dictated to, Damien Montgomery. I will not watch these men and women tear down a man who has saved the Protectorate again and again for their own power.”

  “My liege,” Damien replied. “I serve because I choose to. You did not conscript me. You did not force me to this. You cannot force me to remain.”

  The tiny office was silent.

  “You had a breakthrough on the Keepers?” Alexander asked him.

  “On their murderer, at least,” he admitted. “Others can follow up. The Belt Liberation Front is tied into this mess, but
…the Navy can deal with them. I’ve prepared the case for the Inquest. Another Hand can serve.”

  Slowly, with hands that seemed they could not believe what they were doing, Damien unclasped the golden icon of his office.

  “My liege, I swore an oath to serve the people, the Protectorate and you,” he reminded Alexander. “In that order.”

  “I do not accept your resignation,” the Mage-King said stiffly, coldly. “I will not.”

  “You cannot force me to serve,” Damien repeated, laying the golden hand on his King’s desk. “And there are a thousand thousand other ways I can serve the people and the Protectorate. I will not be the wedge on which our nation breaks.”

  Alexander still refused to face him, staring out at Mars.

  “You are a better man than I deserve,” he told Damien. “May I ask, then, one last service?”

  “You remain my King.”

  “Follow this case to the end,” Alexander ordered. “Bear my Voice if not my Hand into the Belt and deal with those who have brought fire and blood to this system.

  “Then come to Ceres. If I cannot deny you this sacrifice, then I will by all that is divine shove it down those self-righteous bastards’ throats!”

  Damien sighed but bowed.

  “As you command, my King.”

  #

  Chapter 29

  Despite its dense circuits and weight of responsibility, the golden hand wasn’t a particularly heavy object. Damien had grown used to its presence on his chest, but he would never have expected the absence of the small icon to be as obvious as it was.

  He left Alexander’s office with a folded piece of parchment in the breast pocket of his suit, but that hardly made up for the absence of the golden hand of his now former office. He’d known—or at least been afraid—that it could come to this, but he didn’t truly have any plans for what happened next.

  Romanov and Christoffsen were waiting for him. The ex-Governor noticed first, his gaze dropping to Damien’s chest before he inhaled in shock.