Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  “I’m impressed,” he told Dr. Kael. “Kurosawa was powerful.”

  “Martian and Mage by Blood,” the chief scientist replied, as if that answered the question. “My understanding is that he was very powerful, as these things are measured. Not sure how he could have been killed by magic!”

  “He wasn’t combat-trained,” Damien said softly, considering the archway. “But his power would have allowed him a decent chance against any Mage that wasn’t.”

  “What does that even mean?” Kael demanded.

  “That you have a combat-trained Mage hiding among your staff,” the Hand told him. “Which suggests that this was hardly personal. Kurosawa’s killer was a professional.”

  The Expedition head didn’t get a chance to reply before one of the two Secret Service agents who’d gone forward returned.

  “The gallery we were told about is clear,” he told Damien. “We haven’t checked further, but we’ve got sensors on the entrances. Should be safe.”

  “Come on, Johannes,” Damien told the doctor. “Let’s go take a look at the Strangers’ magic, shall we?”

  #

  The gallery was impressive from what Damien could see, which wasn’t much with the limited light of the flashlights. They picked out the railing of the galleries glittering off the silver band he presumed to be the runes Kurosawa had found.

  “Give me a moment,” he ordered the other men. Even Kael paused, unsure whether or not to argue, long enough for Damien to channel energy through his Runes and conjure a cool-but-bright ball of light and pitch it into the air.

  A moment’s concentration put the small artificial sun in the middle of the room, hanging a dozen meters above the dry ancient fountain. Murals in odd purplish colors covered the outer walls, and the half-rusted poles of long-ago vendors’ stalls and tents still stuck up from the ground.

  With the room lit up, it was easy for Damien, at least, to pick out the signs of a Mage fight. Scorch marks covered the wall behind him and parts of the railing. It was also sadly easy to pick up where Professor Yoshi Kurosawa’s life had ended: a chunk of the edge of the old fountain was the reddish-brown stain of recently dried blood.

  “His body, of course, is in storage at the base,” Kael said quietly. “We…well, we didn’t have the gear for forensics, so I ordered the lower levels guarded and kept for your people.”

  “Inspector Dragic will go over both the body and the crime scene,” Damien told him. “Is anyone in the Expedition qualified to do an autopsy?”

  “We have a couple of medical doctors, but…I don’t think so.”

  “Then the Inspector will walk them through it,” the Hand replied with a confidence he wasn’t sure he felt. He certainly couldn’t run an autopsy.

  Leaving the others behind, Damien walked up to the edge of the railing. The sensors on his breather, linked to his PC, told him the main function of the runes as he glanced at their results. The toxic levels of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide had been scrubbed from the air. The oxygen content was increased above levels humans would find comfortable.

  While it had been made decorative and part of the life of the base, this gallery had been a magically secured emergency shelter, its air purified by a heavily secured and charged spell that had survived centuries without maintenance.

  Damien was impressed.

  Kneeling next to the stone railing with its strip of silver inlay, he looked at the runes and Saw. Where anyone else would only see the silver itself, he saw the flow of power itself through the silver. He also saw that while it had worked unmaintained for centuries, it wouldn’t do so much longer.

  There hadn’t been much power left in the runes, and they’d taken damage in the fight where Kurosawa had died. What power was left was sputtering out, supercharging an effect that wouldn’t have been powerful enough to fully purify the air, but also reducing its lifespan to a matter of days.

  He blinked, shaking his head. The pattern looked very familiar. Too familiar. He’d been a Jump Mage before he’d been a Hand—the two runes required for that job were still inlaid into his palm—and he knew what an emergency air-purification spell looked like.

  It was strange. It looked the same but different, and he couldn’t put his finger on it. Like he was reading a sentence he knew in a foreign language but was still able to puzzle it out because they were both Latin languages using the same alphabet…

  “That’s impossible,” he whispered, but he brought his PC up to take a photo and run it through his software regardless.

  The piece of code he used had been custom-written by the current Mage-King before he’d taken his throne. Both Desmond the Third and Damien had worked on it since then, and it was able to recognize any arrangement of the seventy-six characters and fourteen connectors in the Martian Runic script and reduce them to a circuit diagram.

  Normally, the Rune Wrights didn’t need it. The program had been made for Hands other than Damien, none of whom were Rune Wrights. But right now…he needed the confirmation.

  A confirmation by the software happily popped up, unaware of how deeply its simple conclusion shook the foundations of human knowledge of the universe.

  “Dr. Kael,” Damien said levelly. “You are certain no human was in here before Kurosawa?”

  “Absolutely,” the Expedition leader replied. “We dated the rubble back when we were mapping the facility. The cave-in was just over two hundred years ago. The Protectorate barely existed then. No one had been to this star system.” He paused. “Why?”

  “Because if we hadn’t found this behind a cave-in, sealed away for hundreds of years, I would say someone was playing a prank on you, Doctor,” the Hand told him. “But since we did, I’m afraid I know what Kurosawa died for.

  “These aren’t alien runes, Dr. Kael. These are ours. Martian Runic.”

  “That’s impossible,” the xenoarchaeologist replied. “I’m no student of runes, my lord, but even I know Martian Runic was only developed in the twenty-third century by the Eugenicists!”

  “Earlier than that,” Damien said quietly. The Olympus Mons amplifier had, after all, enabled the Olympus Project to identify children with scraps of the Gift for their forced breeding program that had started in the twenty-one-fifties. “But much of the details of the origin of human magic was lost when the Mages overthrew the Eugenicists,” he admitted.

  “But that is details,” Damien continued, staring at the runes. “Because you’re right. This facility uses the same runes we do and predates human magic.”

  From the stunned expression on the scientist’s face—and his bodyguards’ faces, for that matter—told him everyone else had caught up.

  Unlike anyone else here, Damien knew that Martian Runic was not an entirely efficient way of organizing magic. He’d discussed revamping the language with the Mage-King, but the current conclusion was that it was just too huge a project.

  Aliens would have—must have—developed their own not-entirely-efficient language.

  There was only one way these runes could be the same as humanity’s: if humanity had learned rune magic from the Strangers.

  Chapter 8

  Despite Dr. Kael’s clear impatience, Damien took another half-hour to carefully review the rest of the runes in the ancient gallery, the cold light of his false sun lighting up the silver even more clearly than daylight would have.

  The matrix that covered the railings didn’t change anywhere along the way. A regular Rune Scribe would have recognized the runes, but the layout and structure were sufficiently different that they’d have problems being certain what they did without taking time to review it in detail.

  The runes were sufficiently the same that even the most recently graduated Rune Scribe would be able to break down the purpose and function of the runes. It wasn’t just the script that was the same. Reading the alien runes was like what he imagined reading Spanish as a Portuguese speaker would be. The script was the same and the syntax and grammar were similar enough to help, but the w
ords, while similar, were different.

  “We’ll need to sweep the entirety of the lower levels for any other samples of runes,” he told Kael. “Not today, but before I leave. This is…huge.”

  “This is unimaginably huge,” Kael replied. “My lord, this could make the career of every scientist here! We’ll need to bring in real experts, not Kurosawa’s mundane students, as soon as possible!”

  “We’ll see about that,” Damien said sharply. If nothing else, the three who’d worked with Kurosawa were who was available, and he wasn’t sure just how far he really wanted to spread the knowledge of these runes just yet.

  Someone had died for it already, after all.

  “I need to go over everything you have on this base,” he concluded aloud. “Not just what’s been published, but every scrap of data, every artifact analysis, everything. There are patterns I may see that you haven’t.”

  “Of course, Lord Montgomery.” The administrator paused. “Does this…mean the Protectorate will be taking over?”

  “Probably,” Damien admitted. “We’re unlikely to change up too much. At least initially, we’ll just bring in more security and some specialized Mages.”

  Most likely, Kael would be left in place heading the civilian side until or unless he pissed someone off. Based off the Hand’s experiences with him so far, Damien figured that could take as little as six hours or as much as six months, depending on the temperament of whoever ended up in charge there.

  “Let’s get back to the base,” he ordered. “Malcolm, Connor, lead the way.”

  The two Secret Service agents had been guarding the passage back to the human base since arrival, while their third companion had been trailing Damien around the gallery. At Damien’s order, they swept the tunnel with their lights, making sure at least the first few meters were clear before everyone entered.

  Once Damien and Kael had reached them, they led the way back, their lights illuminating the hallway and side corridors as they advanced. They’d already come this way, but the Martian Secret Service didn’t train their people to make assumptions.

  The lead pair made sure there was at least two meters’ distance between them and their charges—two meters that saved everyone else’s lives.

  Damien didn’t see the tripwire or the mines. He could see magic where others saw only silver, but that didn’t allow him to see technology no one had ever touched with a spell.

  Neither of the two agents saw them either. Malcolm stopped in the middle of the hallway as he hit the tripwire—and had just enough time to look back at Damien and yell “Shield!” before the mines went off.

  The Hand’s sense of danger was as sharply tuned as anyone’s, so he had a shield of solid force in front of him before the Service agent had finished yelling.

  It took time to stretch it forward and shield the two people out in front. Time Malcolm and Connor didn’t have. Half a dozen directional mines had been mounted on each side of the wall since they’d come in, and they all detonated simultaneously, filling the ancient corridor with fire and deadly projectiles.

  Both lead agents went down, dead—shredded—before they hit the ground, but Damien’s shield was in place in time to save the rest of them. The projectiles hammered against his barrier, testing his strength, and then it was over.

  And then the shooting started.

  “Down!” Damien was hit in the middle of the back by the remaining Secret Service agent, flung to the ground as an automatic weapon sprayed the corridor with bullets. The man rolled off Damien and came up firing his own weapon—only for a blast of flame to rip the weapon from his hand.

  Gunfire and Mage-fire resumed a moment later—and slammed headlong into Damien’s shield, now covering them from the front as he rose to his feet.

  “Get back, both of you,” he ordered the scientist and bodyguard. “This one’s mine.”

  The next salvo was a string of grenades, and Damien winced as the energy transfer rippled back into him. It was roughly equivalent to the recoil of a large pistol, far less dangerous than the grenades but uncomfortable. Stopping more of the energy would take more of his energy—and he had other uses for that.

  “I am Hand Damien Montgomery,” he snapped down the corridor, using his Sight to track where the firebolts had come from. There. He started walking toward the attacker. “You know how this has to end. You have thirty seconds to surrender.”

  The response was…disturbing. Another mine had been concealed at the height of his arm on the side corridor he was following the attacker down, and went off as he passed it.

  His main shield was along the corridor path, but he’d still wrapped a lesser shield around himself. The explosive sprayed its deadly projectiles into his right arm, smashing against the shield and smearing metal across his jacket arm for a moment.

  The suit jacket was wrecked. His defense had stopped the mine from killing him, but enough heat and melted metal had burned through to shred the suit. Its expensive-looking fabric concealed an expensive flexible composite, though, that had sacrificed itself to save him.

  Under the wrecked suit, the Rune of Power inlaid into his forearm was now fully visible, and with a chill, Damien realized that the mine hadn’t been meant to kill him. It had been meant to break or damage the Rune, one of the five that made him, born a Mage of average strength, the second most powerful Mage alive.

  No matter who his attacker was, they shouldn’t have known about those Runes. One was inlaid on the right forearm of every Hand—more than one was only possible when a Rune Wright was designing the Runes on themselves, unfortunately—but the source of the Hand’s extraordinary power was kept secret.

  “Right,” he muttered aloud, forcing his shield forward as a second salvo of grenades launched out of the darkness. “Time’s up.”

  He caught the grenades with his power and flung them aside as he charged forward. A tighter shield wrapped around him now, protecting him as a series of mines at the right height and angle to hit a Hand’s Rune fired off as he passed them.

  Another sweep of power caught up the projectiles and explosive force of those weapons and brought them with him. His Sight picking out the Mage in the tunnels with him, he threw all of that force directly at them.

  The speed and power of the shield they conjured answered his question. His attacker was a trained Combat Mage—and almost certainly Kurosawa’s killer.

  “Why’d you kill the doctor?” he demanded, following a trail he was sure the assassin didn’t know they were leaving.

  “Orders,” a feminine voice replied, though his Sight showed she was somewhere different from the source. Probably a speaker. “Same as you. Some secrets must be kept, no matter the price.”

  “You know you can’t kill me,” he said quietly. “Turn in your employers and I can arrange clemency.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she snapped. The voice was still coming from in front of him, but she’d taken another tunnel and was sneaking around behind him, using the speaker as a distraction. “I am a Keeper and my oaths will be kept!”

  She lunged from the corridor, a long rune-encrusted knife, presumably designed to cut though a Mage’s shield, in her hand.

  Damien’s power flared in the underground tunnel, the Runes of Power across his body flashing with heat as he caught her arm, overcoming the knife’s runes with sheer overwhelming power and stopping her in mid-strike.

  Frozen in the moment, he got a good look at his attacker for the first time. She was dressed in the same plain lab utilities as everyone else on the base and wearing light-gathering optics above her breather. He couldn’t see her eyes, but the cast of her face made her anger clear.

  She twisted to escape his hold—and then her arm snapped like a twig, the knife falling from nerveless fingers as Damien tried to maintain his hold. Her other had lifted the deadly-looking carbine she’d been firing earlier.

  He lashed out with a bolt of pure force. He was trying to just stop the weapon, but he lost
a degree of fine control when he was doing multiple things at once. Her arm snapped back, the second limb snapping in a handful of moments.

  “Others will come,” she told him, her voice thick with pain. “The secret will be kept.”

  Then she spasmed, the distinct convulsions of poison. Damien dropped her, pulling clean air around them as he desperately tried to pull off her breather to force out whatever pill she’d taken.

  Despite his power, he was only human. By the time he got the face mask off, her mouth was full of foam and her convulsions were weakening. He stared at her in horror as she gave one final full-body convulsion…and stopped.

  Chapter 9

  The tunnel behind Damien had collapsed as the explosions rippled through it. They’d been closer to the surface than he’d initially thought, though, as he could see the sky through the holes. If he hadn’t already been wearing a breather, the atmosphere could have been a problem.

  The assassin was a slight woman, not much taller than Damien but easily beyond his ability to carry. With a sad sigh, he wrapped gentle bands of power around the body and lifted it up after him as he climbed up the debris into the ruins of the surface portion of the Strangers’ base.

  “Corei, do you read me?” he said, opening a channel to his surviving Secret Service agent. “Are you and Dr. Kael all right?”

  “We’re okay, but the tunnel you went through collapsed. Where are you?!”

  Damien glanced around him. Despite the base being abandoned for centuries; the local plant life was only now beginning to break through the sealed concrete. There weren’t many exterior structures there, but there had been garages and even what looked like had been the site for a set of surface-to-space missiles. The immense domes rose all around him and blocked his view of the prefabricated models of the base camp.

  “I’m on the surface,” he told his bodyguard. “Take Dr. Kael back to the base. I’ll coordinate with Lieutenant Romanov’s people to get back inside myself.”