Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  “We’re hoping to find something a bit larger than that,” Denis replied. “Do we have a sector yet?”

  “Search pattern’s downloading now,” she replied. “CIC’s best guess puts the simulacrum chamber or any bridge remnants here.” She highlighted a section of the screen in front of them.

  “Are we actually expecting trouble?” she asked, gesturing to Denis’s exosuit armor and rifle.

  “If I was expecting trouble, I’d be carrying a bigger gun,” he replied. The rifle was almost too small to be used by an exosuited soldier. “We Marines are just the largest contingent of EVA-trained personnel aboard, and we’re less useful than the EVA-trained techs for repairing Duke, so we got cleanup.”

  “Lucky you,” she said. “And I get to haul you guys through a debris zone. It’s like Academy worst-case exercises all over again.”

  “Let’s just see if we find something worth landing on,” Denis noted. “The Hand would love a living prisoner, however beat-up.”

  The pilot nodded, carefully guiding the spacecraft deeper into the cloud, mostly vapor but with a few chunks of physical debris, that had been an attacking ship.

  “Sir,” the pilot said after a moment. “Is it true…

  “What?” he asked carefully.

  “That there was another Hand aboard this ship?”

  Denis sighed.

  “From what Montgomery said, it seems highly likely,” he said quietly. “That’s why we sent Marines.”

  Hopefully, the bastard was dead. Though Denis had made it quietly clear to every officer going in searching the debris that if they found a living Hand, no one would ask questions if they died before reaching Duke.

  His people couldn’t fight a Hand, but shooting a wounded one in the head?

  Given his choices, Denis Romanov wouldn’t even hesitate.

  #

  “I think that’s the best you’re going to get,” the pilot finally told Denis, highlighting the chunk of metal in the screens. “It isn’t much, but hell, even Duke’s sensors couldn’t resolve just how many missiles we hit this bitch with.”

  That was a chunk of hull less than ten meters on a side, almost certainly from near the center of the ship, though clearly not the simulacrum chamber itself. It was melted and battered—but it was also the only significant piece left of the Keeper ship.

  “Hold us at fifty meters; we’ll jump the rest of the way,” he told her. “Thanks.”

  “Part of the service,” she replied with an airy wave.

  Leaving the cockpit, Denis rejoined his old squad. He was getting comfortable with the rest of the company he’d been given, but the squad that was all that remained of his old platoon were still his strong right hand.

  “All right, we have a fragment,” he told them. “Not enough space for everybody. Chan—your fire team’s with me.”

  He didn’t hear any immediate response as he placed and sealed his exosuit helmet, locking himself in against the vacuum of space.

  “We’re good to go,” Chan reported once everyone was linked in. “Please let us lead the way, sir.”

  “I’m not the Hand,” Denis pointed out calmly. “It took me longer than it should to convince him he shouldn’t make this sweep himself. I know my place in this kind of op.”

  #

  The airlock door shut behind them and the five Marines were blasted out into space along with the air. Training and experience allowed Denis to readily control his course with the exosuit’s jets, directing himself toward the designated chunk of debris.

  In obedience to Corporal Chan’s request, he hung back enough to allow the other Marines to land first, electromagnets in the boots locking them to plain metal floors. There were gravity runes on the floors of the ship section and they even appeared to still have power, but Denis wasn’t taking any chances.

  “Sweep for any survivors,” he ordered. It was possibly someone who’d been in a proper ship-suit or had been close to an emergency locker had survived the destruction of the ship. Finding anyone like that was the main point of the trip, but he had little hope.

  “Once we’re sure we’ve found anyone on board, let’s grab samples of anything you can find,” he continued. “Hull metal. Furniture. Fabric. Bodies. Let’s see what we can find.”

  The fire team obediently moved forward, spreading out through the dark and frozen remnants of a starship.

  “Sir, you might take a look at this,” Chan reported after a moment. Denis joined him in a few long strides to find him studying a door. “Look’s like the Captain’s briefing room, but check out the seal.”

  The commissioning seal on the door was in the same style as the ones the Royal Martian Navy had a bad habit of putting everywhere aboard their own ships, but where the RMN one had Royal Martian Navy across the top and the ship name across the bottom, this one simply had the name Keeper of Oaths.

  The logo was a stylized mailed fist holding a scroll, etched in what was potentially real gold.

  “Any atmosphere on the other side?”

  “Not a drop,” Chan told him.

  No air meant no survivors—or at least, none that would complain when they kicked the door down. Stepping back to cover the door with his rifle, he gestured for Chan to open it.

  One powered boot later, Denis followed the NCO into what had been a small briefing room. Now, the entire far wall was gone and it appeared the central table had been on fire until all of the oxygen left.

  “Looks the same as ours,” he concluded aloud, checking under the table. “Yep, computer setup is in the same place—slagged by the heat.”

  Chan had been checking the podium at the other end, looking for papers or data storage.

  “Nothing here, either,” he reported. “Damn, I was hoping, but it looks like this one’s a bust.”

  “Let’s check everywhere else,” Denis ordered. “It’s not that big a hunk of debris.

  #

  “The commissioning seal was the only thing of real interest we found,” Romanov admitted later to a small meeting of Damien’s advisors. The gold seal, cut with a hand laser from the door it had been mounted on, sat in the middle of the table.

  The Marine looked disappointed to Damien, as if he’d hoped to bring back some kind of definitive evidence or gaudy loot to make the delay to study Keeper of Oaths’ wreckage worth it. Just the name of the ship was telling, though, as it at least confirmed who the ship had belonged to.

  “I’m surprised there was even that much left,” Jakab told them. “We hit that ship with almost four hundred missiles.”

  “From what we saw, she was built to the same standard as Navy ships,” the Marine replied. “Internal armoring, buffer sections, the works. Didn’t leave anything useful, though.”

  “What about material samples?” Damien asked. Those had let them identify where the shuttles had come from, so he had hope for information from the wreckage of the enemy ship.

  “My people and Jakab’s MP forensics team have been going over what we got,” Amiri told him. “It’s…well, it’s not much use. Even the one significant chunk had taken enough heat and radiation that we couldn’t localize the hull metal.

  “What did turn out to be of use was the commissioning seal itself.” She gestured toward the golden symbol. “It was roughly central to the debris piece, so it got minimal radiation, and gold is significantly easier to trace than steel or titanium.”

  “Did you find the source?” Damien demanded.

  “It’s from Mars,” she said flatly. “The John Carter mining complex, barely two hundred kilometers from Olympus Mons. While we can’t be certain about the hull metal, our higher certainties—only about sixty or seventy percent likely, to be clear—place the source in either the asteroid belt or the Jovian Trojans.”

  “She was built in Sol,” Damien concluded. “I’m not surprised.” He sighed. “While I’m sure the rumor mill is having a field day and we won’t feed it, I can confirm this for everyone here: there was a Hand on Keeper of Oaths.


  “I can’t say which one, and given how scattered and only semi-linked we all are, it may be weeks or more before we know who,” he continued. “But we—I—killed a Hand today.”

  The room was silent.

  “That’s unprecedented,” Christoffsen finally said. “Hands have died in the line of duty—Conrad Michaels most recently—but a Hand has never been killed by another Hand.”

  Conrad Michaels had taken the dubious privilege of being the most recent Hand to die in service to Mars from Alaura Stealey a month before, when his investigation into an arms smuggling ring had gone sour.

  Two other Hands were now completing his investigation, with a Navy cruiser squadron backing them up. A Hand falls, another rises.

  “I know,” Damien told the Professor. “But…one way or another, a Hand was going to kill another Hand today. I suspect His Majesty will forgive me for not simply dying to avoid a political crisis.”

  He let that hang for another moment of silence, then turned to Jakab.

  “Mage-Captain, can Duke get us home?” he asked.

  “We’re only two jumps out, and the matrix appears materially intact to our inspection,” he reported. “We’re down an engine, so we can’t go over our ten gee flank if we wanted to, but we should be able to get back to Mars safely.”

  “It looks like I’m taking you from one repair yard to another,” the Hand said softly. “I apologize. I’ll… The dead—”

  “—will be listed in the Navy rolls with honor,” Jakab cut him off. “They died protecting a Hand. We’ll get as many of them home as we can, and we’ll hold a general memorial once we’re back at Mars.”

  “I…will make certain I can attend,” Damien told him. “I owe them that. And a thousand times more.”

  “Find the bastards who sent that ship after us, my lord,” Duke of Magnificence’s commander replied. “When they have faced justice, our ghosts will rest easy.”

  “You have my word,” the Hand promised. “Your dead will have justice.”

  Chapter 30

  Duke of Magnificence limped into Mars orbit in a vastly different state than anyone on the surface of humanity’s capital world had expected. One of the battleships permanently placed in Mars orbit shepherded them in, Reminder of Liberation hovering over her smaller sister like any anxious sibling would.

  Aboard her, with a heavy tread, Damien led his small party toward the shuttle bay. Once again, the ship had suffered carrying out his mission. It seemed he was doomed to lead the men and women of the Royal Martian Navy into battle.

  Amiri and Christoffsen followed behind, a trio of Secret Service agents bringing up the rear to provide additional security even there. They’d all picked up something of his mood, staying silent as they made the trek from Damien’s office—undamaged, despite everything—through the damaged battlecruiser to the shuttle waiting to return him to Mars.

  He stepped into the bay, one of the largest open spaces aboard the massive battlecruiser, and stopped dead as he realized it was full of people. Front and center, a double file of Marines headed by Mage-Captain Denis Romanov, but behind them were…dozens, hundreds of the ship’s crew.

  “ATTEN-HUT!” Mage-Captain Kole Jakab’s voice snapped out, and every off-duty member of Duke of Magnificence’s crew snapped to attention and saluted as one.

  Blinking back tears and surprise, Damien returned the salute as carefully as he could, facing the spacers who’d fought for him again.

  “My Lord Montgomery,” Jakab said loudly, stepping forward in front of his crew and offering his hand. “It may have taken longer than we’d have liked, but we bought you home.”

  “I seem to have got your ship a little beaten up again, Captain,” Damien admitted, taking the proffered hand. “We may have faced a few more trials than any of us expected along the way.”

  “We did,” the Captain confirmed. “But we faced them together. And we’ve a few scratches to fix up, my lord, but once that’s done, Duke of Magnificence and her crew will be ready to serve however you ask of us.

  “We’d all be dead twice over without you,” he said. “This crew will not forget, Lord Montgomery. Call, and we will answer. Command, and we will obey. For as long you’ll have us, this is your ship and your crew.”

  Now he truly was blinking back tears.

  “I could ask for no finer crew, no finer ship to have at my back,” Damien told them, speaking to the crew more than Jakab. “I have asked more of you than I would have asked of anyone given a choice, and you have risen to that call again and again.

  “Duty takes me home to Mars, but I know duty will carry me away from Mars as well. And when duty calls for me to leave this world behind, I would do so on no other ship, with no other crew.”

  “We made it this far together, sir,” Jakab told him. “Mage-Captain Romanov will join you on the surface once we’ve had a chance to sort out quarters for his company.”

  “Thank you,” Damien said softly, quietly enough that none of the crew could hear him.

  “Don’t thank me,” the Captain replied. “It was their idea. My crew knows their Hand, after all.”

  #

  It was summer in the northern hemisphere of Mars around Olympus Mons, and bright green grass and trees crawled their way up the slopes of the immense mountain, winding through the wide thoroughfares and planned boulevards of Olympus City.

  The City stopped below the snow line, not technically part of “the Mountain” people spoke of when they talked of the Martian government. The terraforming of Mars, a process accelerated by the first Mage-King and augmented to include, among other things, adjusting Mars’s rotation to the same twenty-four-hour day as Earth, was now hundreds of years old. The complex Damien was headed to, however, predated that terraforming.

  First carved into Olympus Mons to house the army the Eugenicists had later used to conquer Mars, the network of tunnels and caves now referred to with the same name as the mountain had then housed the monstrous forced breeding experiments of the Olympus Project, birthing humanity’s Mages.

  When DMA-651, the man who would later become Desmond Michael Alexander, had realized what the runes in the complex did, he had turned on his creators and destroyed them. Using the power of the Olympus Mons Amplifier, he had forced peace in the Solar System and made himself ruler of all humanity.

  But the use of the Amplifier meant he had to live in the Olympus Mons tunnels—and the access to those tunnels turned out to be above the snow line on terraformed Mars.

  Even as Damien looked down over the summer green of Olympus City, wind and snow buffeted the shuttle. His pilot was one of the veterans from Jakab’s crew, however, and she handily guided the spacecraft through the turbulence until the air suddenly, literally magically, smoothed out as they approached the pad they’d been directed to.

  The Hand breathed deeply, making sure his suit was perfectly aligned, his fist-like symbol of office was showing on his chest and his Mage medallion was secure on his throat. He’d left Mars a year before, officially an Envoy, informally an apprentice Hand.

  He’d only been back once since: a single three-day visit for Alaura Stealey’s funeral that had been more a blur than anything else.

  The shuttle settled down onto the pad with a flash of superheated steam as a drift of snow evaporated under the thrusters. From repeated experience, Damien knew that the reinforced concrete of the pad would be skin-meltingly hot. That heat was one of the reasons Marine exosuits existed, though he hadn’t known any of them to complain about the extra armor the rest of the time.

  “Looks like you have a welcoming party, my lord,” the pilot told him, and he looked at the external screens.

  He’d half-expected a swarm of government officials, security, etcetera. Instead, there was a quiet cordon of Secret Service agents around the pad, but only three people waited by the tunnel into the Mountain.

  Damien recognized all three of them in an instant, though the youngest had shot up at least fifteen centimeters since
he last saw her.

  “I guess I’d better hurry,” he told the pilot past the lump in his throat.

  It wouldn’t do, after all, to keep the entire Martian Royal Family waiting.

  #

  Shielding yourself from the heat of a landing pad was within the capacity of many normal Mages, though not all. There were tricks you could teach that would allow most Mages to do it, but even then, it was generally wiser to simply wait out the temperature. Most landing pads on major worlds had underground cooling tubes that would whisk away the heat in a few minutes.

  For a Hand with even a single Rune of Power, it was a relatively small drain on power, often used to help awe whatever local powers they were going to have to work with.

  Today, Damien simply used it to get across the pad to meet his King faster. He reached the cleared ground beyond the pad, releasing his power as it was finally cool enough to walk without it, and saluted Desmond Michael Alexander the Third crisply.

  Any attempt at formality or ceremony promptly disintegrated two seconds later when the gawky form of the Mage-King’s younger child slammed into him. Kiera Michelle Alexander, Princess of Mars, was fourteen years old and lankily carved from skin and bone at over a hundred and sixty centimeters—at this point, taller than Damien by a large margin.

  She hugged with all of the grace and energy of an eager colt, and he returned the hug with a sheepish grin at the King.

  Desmond Michael Alexander the Third, Mage-King of Mars and Protector of Man, simply laughed. He was a tall man with hair silvered with age, no longer the platinum blond of his two children. Like his children, he was carved from skin and bone, but what was gawky and endearing in the two teenagers was stern and foreboding to those who didn’t know the man.

  Though well into a vigorous second century, there were few lines on his face and he moved with grace and energy.

  “I am the ruler of a hundred worlds, master of a Navy without peer in history, and wield magics unknowable by most of mankind,” Desmond said calmly, “but I am not fool enough to believe I rule my children.”