Kiera stepped back slightly, examining Damien’s face.
“You look tired,” she told him. Someday, she’d learn her father’s social grace, but she remained as blunt as she had been when he left. “I saw some of the reports.” She glanced back at her father. “You should have come home sooner.”
“He’s been busy, Kie,” Desmond Alexander the Fourth, most commonly known as “Des” still, told his little sister as he shook Damien’s hand. The eighteen-year-old Crown Prince of Mars had finally matched his father’s towering height while Damien had been away, easily thirty-five centimeters above Damien’s own diminutive size, though he managed to be even skinnier than his father with it. “Plus, I seem to recall you trying to scare him away.”
The younger Alexander sibling flushed beet-red and looked away from Damien.
“I was thirteen,” she pointed out from the lofty maturity of fourteen. “And…you look awful, Damien. Are you all right?”
“It’s been a rough few weeks,” he admitted, meeting the Mage-King’s gaze. “I’m not sure I can talk about it yet, either. You’ll have to ask your father.”
“Fine,” Kiera Alexander responded with an exaggerated sigh. “Or I can flutter my eyelashes at Chancellor Gregory and talk up ‘wanting to be informed about the state of the nation’.” Her pious tone was almost enough to convince Damien, and he knew the Princess’s foibles.
So did Chancellor Malcolm Gregory, the man who helped run the day-to-day of the Protectorate Government. It would work, but only because the second-in-line to the Throne in the Mountain did need to be informed about the state of the nation, not because he’d been fooled.
“Come, Kiera, Des,” the King said quietly. “I promised you could meet Damien at the pad, but he and I have work to discuss. He will be joining us for dinner, so you can bend his ear then. There will be a reception afterwards,” he warned Damien, “but dinner will be quiet.”
Damien recognized the order in the stressed word and nodded his obedience.
“So long as we get that talk,” he murmured.
“Immediately,” Alexander promised. “We cleared my afternoon when we saw that Duke had battle damage.”
#
The Mage-King led Damien to a familiar old-fashioned, wood-paneled study with a roaring fireplace in one corner. A set of overstuffed chairs surrounded the fireplace, completing the illusion of a study predating Earth’s space age.
Of course, this study was buried deep inside Olympus Mons, had a gravity less than half of Earth’s, had windows that showed a completely artificial scene, and processed the smoke from the fire with some of the most advanced carbon-capture technology in a hundred systems.
It was an illusion but one Damien knew Alexander found comforting—for all that the era was an illusion, the age of the room wasn’t. It had been set up like this by Desmond Alexander the Second, and apparently, the current bearer of the name had fond memories of his father in this room.
The current ruler of all mankind got Damien into one of the chairs and grabbed two mugs of steaming tea.
“I have to agree with Kiera, though I’d normally be less forthright about it,” he said finally. “You look awful, and your cruiser looks worse. I’m sure there will be formal reports galore, which I will not have time to read all of, but summarize for me.”
“We were attacked,” Damien began slowly, considering. “Two jumps out from Mars, by the ship that hit Andala. They…” He sighed. “That ship was built like our best. Battleship-grade lasers. Phoenix VIIIs. An amplifier.”
“Damn. How bad did it get?”
“Bad. Neither of us could hurt the other with missiles, so they surprised us with a micro-jump and the battleship lasers,” the Hand said quietly. “Then they hit us with the amplifier—at ten light-seconds.”
Alexander paused, his tea at his lips. He took a slow sip and swallow, then placed the drink on the tray next to his chair for it.
“One of ours,” he said calmly. He wasn’t referring to the ship. “How did you survive?”
“Has a Rune Wright ever been attacked by an amplified Mage before?” Damien asked.
“Not…that I am aware of,” Alexander admitted. “My sister is the only Alexander to have gone into the Navy, and you seem to be the only person finding enemies with our own magical weapons.”
“I could feel the attack spells forming,” the younger man said. “And I managed to…shove it away somehow. I think it’s the only reason we survived.”
“And no one could have predicted that,” the King said grimly. “Not even someone with all of the information. Ten light-seconds… They had a Rune of Power, didn’t they?”
“Without question,” Damien told him. “It had the right flavor of power. So, either I just killed a mystery Rune Wright we didn’t know about or…”
“You just put down a rogue Hand we didn’t know about,” Alexander said. “You did what you had to do, Damien. I don’t doubt that. Please tell me you found something. This is going to be an…ugly kettle of fish regardless.”
“Our attacker ended up thoroughly vaporized, so not as much as I’d like. A commissioning seal calling the ship Keeper of Oaths and not much else.” Damien sighed. “The seal was made with gold from Mars. The ship had our best tech. It had to have been built here, in Sol.”
“Damn. I was hoping…”
“My lord, do you know anything about these Keepers? If they truly are a Royal Order, surely we must know something?”
“I know nothing,” Alexander said. “I’ve had people look, but…”
“But what?”
“I asked my fucking Hands to look,” the King snarled. “The people I trust above all others—but if one of you has betrayed me, who the fuck do I trust?”
“My liege…” Damien swallowed. “My liege, you have to trust us. We know there was one problem—but we also know they’re dead. No one escaped that ship.
“I need resources and authority,” he continued. “But if that ship was built in Sol, we can find her. If we can find where she was built, we can find who had her built. I will find you answers, my King. That is what you have Hands for.”
Alexander held his breath for a long moment before exhaling in a massive sigh.
“And would you trust another Hand at your back with a gun right now, Damien?”
“None of my siblings-in-service would need a gun, my King,” he said softly. “I wouldn’t trust anyone behind me right now. Not until we’re at the bottom of this.”
“You are my Hand,” the Mage-King of Mars finally answered him. “I charge you to follow this rabbit hole. Find who has betrayed us, find this Royal Order of the Keepers of Secrets and Oaths, find this Winton if you can.
“If you need ships, Marines, auditors, bureaucrats, ask. Any resource at my command is at yours. Even in Sol, I do not see all, but if there is a snake in the Mountain, I charge you to bring them to heel.”
The relaxed setting robbed Alexander’s word of not one gram of intensity, and Damien bowed his head.
“You speak for Mars,” the Hand said quietly, “and I will obey.”
Chapter 31
Despite his many responsibilities, Damien knew that the Mage-King made time to have dinner with his children at least three times a week. He hadn’t been a regular attendee when he’d been on Mars—the dinners were probably the only quiet private time the King got—but he’d been one of the few people who were invited.
Tonight, both Damien and Chancellor Malcolm Gregory had joined the Alexanders for dinner. Gregory was an immensely fat man, his hair long lost to premature balding, with a perpetually befuddled smile. He was a mundane, with no magic whatsoever, and occasionally actually succeeded in convincing people he was an overweight, lovable idiot.
Gregory was certainly overweight, and was kind-hearted enough to qualify as lovable—but he was also possibly the smartest man Damien had ever met, a ruthless negotiator and businessman who had dedicated his life to the Protectorate.
“I d
on’t see why I have to wait until I’m fifteen to get a Rune,” Kiera asked. Her tone was more questioning than whiny, which Damien suspected meant she was on her best behavior.
“Because it hurts,” Des told his sister dryly. “And however bad you think it hurts, you’re underestimating it.”
“Try period cramps sometime, dear brother,” the girl said sweetly, causing her sibling to choke on his drink and glare at her. Damien managed to conceal his own choking somewhat more discreetly.
“You had those twice, my dear,” their father reminded her in an indulgent voice. “And the only reason you had them twice is because you were too embarrassed to tell me or Dr. Sair the first time.
“That said,” he continued, “both you and Des are right, but it’s not only a question of pain tolerance. The first reason, though I will freely admit it’s the weakest, is because I said so. The second is that, to date, no one has received a Rune of Power before fifteen, and I am not using my only daughter as a guinea pig.
“There are concerns around significant physical growth after the inlay,” the King reminded her. “It is also a huge responsibility, Kiera. Those Runes make us extremely powerful, which comes with similarly sized responsibility. Every man and woman alive who bears one of those Runes, from myself and your brother to your Aunt Jane, to Damien and every other one of my Hands, has sworn their life to the service of the Protectorate.
“While getting the Rune doesn’t require you to make that oath, it is a step along that path,” he continued. “An utterly irreversible one. So, yes, my dear Kie, you are going to wait until you are fifteen, and I will repeat my explanation as often as you need me to. Because it’s important.”
Kiera sighed but nodded her acceptance of her father’s explanation.
“Does it really hurt that bad?” she asked Damien. “Dad’s were years ago, and well, who trusts their brother?”
“The four I did here on Mars were done under a local anesthetic,” he said carefully. “Those were…uncomfortable. Painful, but…well, I did my first one without anesthetic. There’s no comparison. That was excruciating.”
She stared at him in horror. For various reasons, that part of the story had never come out before.
“Why?” she asked. “Wasn’t that…well, stupid?”
“Rushed,” Damien said dryly, with a glance at Desmond Alexander to be sure he was okay with the story being told. The Mage-King made a go-ahead gesture, and the Hand considered how best to tell the story.
“We were being chased by a crime lord with a stolen cruiser,” he told the Alexander siblings. Des was leaning in with interest as well—and so was Gregory, for that matter. “Azure Gauntlet. Now, Alaura Stealey was on her way with an entire squadron of cruisers, but I didn’t know that. We didn’t have any guns on our ship, just the amplifier I’d built.”
He shrugged.
“I had access to Shelly Monroe’s Rune,” he said quietly. More specifically, he’d had access to Hand Shelly Monroe’s forearm skin, cut from her body after she’d been killed. “Being a Wright, I could see how it had to be changed for me, but I couldn’t risk getting it even slightly wrong, so I didn’t use any anesthetic.
“It worked. Mikhail Azure is dead and I’m still here. I’d do the same thing again in the same place, though I now know I could use a local anesthetic without problems,” he finished with a grin.
It wasn’t a pleasant memory, though not entirely due to the remembered sensation of cutting his own flesh with magic. He’d taken out the cruiser, but not before Azure had launched its missiles at the jump freighter. Without Stealey’s arrival, he’d have died despite everything he and the rest of the ship’s crew had done.
Kiera leaned toward him, her expression intent as she seemed to realize that she could ask him all of the questions about the Runes she might not be comfortable asking her father or trust her brother’s answers.
“How does the silver work?” she asked. “I mean, it can’t be just silver; that would…well, that wouldn’t work.”
“It’s mixed with a polymer base,” he explained. “That makes it flexible enough to move with your skin and tough enough to survive anything that doesn’t completely remove your skin. Um. And some things that will.”
Everyone around the table shivered, including Damien. He didn’t know what they were envisaging, but he had memories of some of the burns he’d acquired on Ardennes.
Answering the Princess’s questions was probably the easiest part of his job so far.
#
Several hours later, the quiet family dinner was a fond memory as Damien found himself the guest of honor at one of the Olympus Court’s irregular formal receptions. While the Mage-King’s court had avoided many of the pitfalls of royal courts of the past—the courtiers were all employed, if nothing else—and its ceremony was minimal, this still required him to chat and smile at people he barely knew by job description.
“We don’t even need the slave saying ‘you too are mortal’,” he murmured to Gregory—his escort and political minder for the evening. “We can just make anyone who’s too successful attend one of these receptions.”
“Be nice, my lord Hand,” the man second in charge of the entire Protectorate murmured back. “His Majesty doesn’t like these affairs much more than you do, so they’re rare—and they make a huge opportunity for new connections.
“By the time the evening is done, at least three new long-term romantic relationships, one political marriage and two multi-billion business deals will have been set in motion. And they get to honor a bona fide hero, who stopped a near–civil war. It’s a win all around.”
“Do I get a cut of the business deals?” Damien muttered, to a chuckle from the Chancellor.
“The couples might name babies after you,” he replied. “But after the whole Antonius affair, there’ll probably be enough babies named Damien on Sherwood and Míngliàng for the whole Protectorate.”
Damien concealed a wince as the next individual came up. Spotting the same golden hand hanging on the newcomer’s chest, he straightened to attention and gave the tall, heavily built man a crisp salute.
“Montgomery,” the stranger rumbled, offering his hand. “Hans Lomond. It’s good to meet you at last.”
It took the younger Hand a moment to get past being almost star-struck. The graying, still powerfully built man he was shaking hands with was the longest-serving Hand alive. It had been Hans Lomond who’d hunted down the men who’d murdered and flayed Shelly Monroe, beginning the sad story that had ended with her forearm skin and its inlaid rune in a store in Darkport. Lomond was a living legend.
“My Lord Lomond,” he replied, “it’s good to meet you. I am honored.”
“I was here on business, but it never hurts to pass up a chance to remind the rest of the Protectorate that we’re the ones who deal with the dirty messes they create when they mess up policy,” Lomond said grimly. “Good work at Antonius. Bit of a softer touch than I tend to find necessary, but it seems to have worked out this time.”
“A harsher touch would have started a civil war,” Damien said quietly. “It’s always better to find the right nail, even when you are a hammer.”
The older Hand chuckled.
“Alaura was always a soft touch,” he pointed out. “It worked for her, most of the time, but, well, there’s a reason she had cybernetics and I don’t.”
Alaura Stealey had taken a grenade to the stomach when a negotiation had gone sideways. Lomond wouldn’t have had that problem, as he generally didn’t bother to negotiate. The old Hand was a legend—but so was Stealey, and Damien opened his mouth to defend his mentor.
“And yet her record speaks for itself,” Gregory interrupted, cutting off Damien’s reaction. “I believe Stealey is currently credited with stopping no less than eight rebellions with no further loss of life.”
“She was good,” Lomond admitted. “Most of us don’t have tongues quite so silver, and it’s naïve to think we aren’t sent on missions that matc
h our talents!”
“Indeed,” Gregory allowed. “His Majesty’s Hands include both hammers and…more complex tools.”
Lomond chuckled again.
“And we know which one I am and which Stealey was,” he allowed. “I’ll leave you to the rest of the crowd,” he told Damien with a jerk of his head at the line behind him, “but if you need to run your current problem past older, if not necessarily wiser, heads, look me up. I’m on planet for at least another week or two.”
“Thank you, my lord,” Damien said, inclining his head. As Lomond walked away, heading for the snack table, the younger Hand glanced over at the Chancellor. “And thank you, my lord,” he murmured as the next guest approached. “I might have said something rash without your intervention.”
“Lomond wouldn’t have taken it as badly as you might fear, but we must show unity in public,” Gregory murmured back. “Appearances are power, after all.”
#
This wasn’t the first formal reception Damien had attended at Olympus Mons, though it was the first that had been for him, and he’d known roughly what to expect. He was still flagging by the time the line of several hundred officials, officers, and bureaucrats had made its way past.
At the very end of the reception line was a small black woman, only a few centimeters taller than Damien himself, wearing a tight-fitting dress with the golden hand of her office dangling, somewhat distractingly, into her cleavage.
He took her hand and bowed over it.
“My lady, I didn’t realize we had quite so many Hands on Mars,” he admitted. He searched his memories, trying to establish which Hand this was. She wasn’t significantly older than he and likely wasn’t Martian-born—her ethnicity wasn’t nearly mixed enough for her to be one of the products of even the less-vicious programs the Eugenicists had implemented on the general population—which meant she had to be…
Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) Page 21
