Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  With the Mage-King tied up meeting with the Council, the only “him” who could convince Hands to help him sneak around out of sight would be…

  “Well, shit,” Damien said aloud.

  “Like I said, I don’t know what’s going on,” the older Hand told him. “In fact, I’m heading out-system in about ten minutes—we think we may have found Julian Falcone’s latest hiding place, and I’m taking a trio of cruisers out to pay a visit.”

  “Good luck,” Damien assured him. Once, long before, he’d passed through Darkport, a slave-trading port run by Julian Falcone. The man had ended up in jail but had broken free after less than a year—and many of the criminals broken free with him had ended up involved in the pirates attacking Sherwood and Míngliàng.

  “I’ve had my ear to the ground for a long time, though, Montgomery. Something stinks on Mars, and it feels like you’ve stirred it all up. The kid wants to help, and he could, but I don’t think he realizes just how bad the snakes’ nest you’re walking into is.”

  “I wasn’t planning on encouraging him,” Damien noted.

  “If you need backup, I can postpone my trip,” Lomond offered. “The Navy can handle Falcone without me. We can call Ndosi, muster up everyone. I don’t know who is fucking with you, Montgomery, but they can’t fight three Hands.”

  “My problem isn’t firepower,” the younger man demurred. “The problem is finding a shadow.”

  Lomond sighed and nodded.

  “And that’s why I go squish pirates,” he said brightly. “And leave the shadows—and the family—to you.”

  “Thanks so much.”

  #

  Desmond Michael Alexander the Fourth, eldest child of the Mage-King of Mars, Rune Wright, and Crown Prince of the Protectorate, looked more than a little guilty as Damien entered the room he was hiding in.

  Des towered over Damien, but that didn’t seem to be making him any more comfortable as the Hand stalked across the room.

  “Does your father even know you’re here?” Damien asked.

  “Yes,” Des replied. “Of course, he thinks I’m seeing Lomond off,” he admitted.

  “As opposed to what, exactly?” the Hand demanded. “Please tell me you at least have your bodyguards here?”

  The youth flushed.

  “Of course. Agent Ishmael brought over a dozen Secret Service agents with him, and we had Lomond’s detail with us aboard the shuttle up. Was rather crowded, all things considered.”

  The boy was irrepressible, and Damien sighed. He hadn’t been a lot better in his own not-too-distant youth.

  “What do you want, Des?” he asked. “This is a giant mess, and not one you need to be anywhere near!”

  “I want to help,” the Crown Prince exclaimed. “I have a full set of Runes of Power, I’m trained as a Jump Mage, I’m as powerful as you or Father. I’m no good to anyone sitting around the Mountain learning how to make nice with politicians!”

  “When you inherit from your father, making nice with politicians will be your job,” Damien pointed out. “Politics is sadly a more useful skill for running the Protectorate than being a fully trained Combat Mage—something you’re not, Des.

  “Even if you were, this isn’t a mission I can use backup for,” he continued. “It’s a question of shadows and answers, conspiracies and lies, and the last thing I need is to be watching an eighteen-year-old with phenomenal cosmic power but not the sense to duck.”

  The tall youth winced.

  “Honestly, you’d have been better off asking your father to send you with Lomond,” the Hand pointed out. “That’s a straightforward assignment, one that would give an idea of just what the people your father commands are sent to do.”

  Des sighed.

  “I…I thought you’d be easier to work with than Lomond,” he admitted. “He’s…intimidating.”

  “Des?” Damien said dryly. “I wouldn’t have let you tag along up to the transfer station. I think you find him easier to manipulate, if nothing else.”

  The youth flushed and sighed.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked plaintively.

  “You’re better off asking your father that than me,” the Hand pointed out. “He’s the one with all the problems of mankind loaded onto his shoulders. I only carry some of the burdens for him.”

  “These Keepers,” Des said quietly. “They scare him. A lot. He thinks Great-Granddad may have betrayed his own Charter and Compact, and the consequences could be bad. The Council is already chipping at the Mountain’s power. If they know the first Mage-King set this into motion…”

  “That’s going to be a headache.” Damien shook his head. He did not want the Mage-King’s job—and Winton had thought that was a prize to tempt him with! He knew enough other headaches of his boss’s to be sure of that. “But this is a situation that needs discretion and speed. I need to be on my way down to Mars to follow up a lead.”

  “Can I help?” Des repeated, and the Hand sighed, realizing that there was something the boy could do.

  “Here.” He loaded a datachip into his wrist PC and transferred all of his files and research, including the IDs they’d managed to make, onto it. “If you want to help? Make sure you deliver this to your father—into his hands, no one else’s. I’m not betting that my enemies don’t know where I’m going and what I’m doing, so let’s make sure my friends do as well.”

  “I will make sure of it!” the Crown Prince promised, as if he’d been asked to do something far more important than act as a secure courier.

  “Tell no one, Des,” Damien told him. “I’m starting to hate secrets, but this has to stay in the shadows a little while longer.”

  Chapter 40

  Finally in a shuttle and descending toward Curiosity City, built on the edge of what had been the Gale Crater and was now the Gale Crater Sea, Damien began to plot his next moves. He was missing the assault shuttle he normally flew in, though, as the runabout had space for only four passengers.

  Flying the shuttle himself allowed him to cram Amiri and three Secret Service Agents into the spacecraft, but that left Romanov and his company sorting out their own ride down to the surface. He would miss the extra firepower, though he was relatively sure he didn’t need it to interview a university professor.

  With a few commands, he opened up a call to the Curiosity City University’s primary reception.

  “Good afternoon,” he greeted the young man who appeared on the other end cheerfully. “This is Hand Damien Montgomery. I’d like to make an appointment to speak with Professor Periklis Raptis.”

  The receptionist paused and took a moment to collect himself before replying.

  “CCU is always ready to help His Majesty’s Hands,” he said brightly. “I can pull up Professor Raptis’s schedule and slot you in whenever he’s free. What time will you be arriving?”

  “Roughly three PM local time,” Damien told him. “If possible, I’d like to meet with the Doctor immediately at that point; I have some questions with regards to his work, but my time, as you can imagine, is very limited.”

  “Of course! Professor Raptis is free at three o’clock,” the receptionist told him eagerly. “I’ll add you to his calendar and let him know you’re on your way!”

  “Thank you.”

  That gave the Rune Scribe and potentially Keeper an hour to try and run away. Damien had a plan for that, too.

  A second set of commands raised the Curiosity City branch of the Martian Investigation Service.

  “This is MIS Curiosity City; how may I help you?” another cheerful young man, almost a clone of the one at CCU except actually in a uniform this time.

  “Connect me to Director Agnes Wong, please,” Damien asked. “This is Hand Montgomery.”

  The junior cop swallowed hard and obeyed with impressive alacrity, not even checking to see if the woman who ran the city’s branch was free or not.

  “This is Wong,” an older woman with the dark brown skin and slanted eyes of a
Martian native answered as the call connected. “This better be good.”

  “This is Hand Montgomery, Director Wong,” Damien greeted her. “I’m going to need to commandeer your resources for a matter of Protectorate security.”

  She nodded slowly with a grumbling cough.

  “We are at the service of His Majesty’s Hands,” she told him.

  “I have reason to believe that Professor Periklis Raptis of the Curiosity City University may shortly attempt to flee the University and, most likely, the city,” Damien replied. “If he does so, I need him intercepted and brought in. Alive.”

  “If he flees?” she asked with an arched eyebrow.

  “‘The wicked flee where no man pursueth’,” Damien quoted at her. “If the good doctor is innocent, he will happily meet with me and we will have a nice chat. If he is not, the last thing he’ll want is to be in the same room as a Hand.”

  Wong chuckled.

  “Sir, I’m pretty innocent, and I’d rather not be in the same room as a Hand,” she pointed out. “I have an aerial unit in the area I’m diverting. They’ll be in position in two minutes, sweeping for his car. I don’t have ground units anywhere nearby; if you want a ground sweep, I’ll need to secure local police.”

  “Do it,” Damien ordered. “No details, only that there’s a warrant for Raptis’s arrest.” He dashed off said warrant as he spoke. If the Professor wasn’t a Keeper, if he’d only worked with Octavian for money or for some other acceptable reason, he could always void the warrant later.

  “My lord, you haven’t given me more details than that,” Wong pointed out. “If he runs, we’ll catch him.”

  “Thank you, Director. It’s nice to be able to rely on the MIS.”

  He leaned back in the cockpit seat as he cut the channel, glancing at Amiri in the copilot’s chair.

  “Do you trust them?” she asked.

  “For this? Yeah,” he allowed. “We’ll have to see what Raptis does.”

  The old rune scribe was the only lead he had. One way or another, Periklis Raptis would lead him to the Keepers.

  #

  The main entrance to Curiosity City University was marked by a statue of the rover the city was named for—an eleven-meter-tall heroic bronze of the robot that had confirmed water on Mars and allowed for the initial, very non-magical colonization of the red planet.

  Even under the current time constraint, Damien couldn’t help but stop in the oval of soft grass and stare in awe at the sheer incongruity of it. One wheel surmounted a stylized mountain and the arm-like camera eye looked benevolently over the city named for it.

  Smiling at both the absurdity and the absolute seriousness of the monument, Damien strode across the front courtyard to the glittering glass structure of the main administration building. Blinking against the reflected light, he stepped into the lobby and looked around for the young man from earlier.

  He found him, along with several other young men and women who were probably students working on their summer break, behind an immense desk that ran across one wall.

  The youth spotted him as he headed toward the desk and stepped out to meet him, eyeing the trailing quartet of suited Secret Service Agents uncomfortably.

  “Hand Montgomery,” he greeted them. “Professor Raptis said he’d meet you in his office. Do you need a guide?”

  “Please,” Damien told him. “Lead the way.”

  He followed the student deeper into the building. Thankfully, once they were out of the main lobby, the glass was tinted on the inside, eliminating the reflection entirely. Raptis’s office was on end of the administration building closest to the Akintola Building, where the Runic Studies department held most of its classes.

  Reaching the door, Damien stepped up and rapped sharply on it.

  “Professor Raptis?” he asked through the door. “This is Hand Damien Montgomery.”

  Only silence answered and the Hand mentally sighed. Gesturing for Amiri and the other agents to move up, he rapped harder on the door.

  “Professor Raptis, please open the door,” he said gently. Mentally counting down from ten, he waited for someone to answer.

  At zero, he made a chopping gesture with his hand and sliced the deadbolt in two. Shoving the door open, he pushed his way into the empty office before their guide even registered what he’d done.

  The office was large but cluttered, with bookshelves covering every inch of the walls and several holo-displays set up in the middle of the room around the desk.

  There were clear signs of a rapid exit, with entire bookshelves emptied onto the floor, presumably to extract a handful of papers or books. There had been a console built into the desk, but the entire electronic portion of the desk had been slagged with magical fire, as had a stack of papers and datachips pushed up against one of the holo-projectors.

  “Well, it seems the Professor wasn’t interested in that interview,” Amiri said quietly.

  “Indeed,” Damien said absently as he tapped the code for Director Wong’s office.

  “Wong, this is Montgomery,” he greeted her. “Raptis has fled his office. Did any of your units pick him up?”

  “Negative,” the MIS Director replied. “We have a hard lock on his car; it hasn’t gone anywhere. He might have slipped past the constables CCPD had in place, but they had a pretty good subtle net up a full half-hour ago. He didn’t leave on the ground or by air, my lord.”

  “Damn,” the Hand murmured. “Search the room,” he ordered the agents. “If he had a getaway plan, let’s hope there’s some clue left here.”

  “Is there anything MIS can do?” Wong asked.

  “See if you can trace his movements,” he ordered. “There has to be some clue where he’s gone.”

  “We’ll do that,” she promised. “I also have a team of my people, not CCPD, on their way to his house. I’ll let you know what we find.”

  #

  Julia stood back, watching the Hand with one eye as her team began to tear apart the cluttered office. He was getting better at hiding his emotions, but after a year, she could tell when he was frustrated. All of their leads right now ended there.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have given him any warning,” she told him.

  “No. If he was a Keeper, he would never have consciously betrayed them,” the Hand replied distractedly. “We needed to know where he ran. We still do.”

  Julia nodded, studying the room and looking for clues. She’d hunted men for money once, in darker corners of the galaxy than her mostly Sol-born Secret Service agents had ever seen. They were stripping bookshelves and moving them away from the wall, but…

  The pattern for a secret exit wasn’t there. There wasn’t enough missing space in the walls.

  “However he left, it wasn’t from here,” she said aloud, turning to their nervous-looking guide. “Kid, what’s your name?” she asked gently.

  “Aaron,” he half-whispered. “Aaron Chun.”

  He didn’t look like a Chun, but as she studied the youth, she picked out the key features of Mars’s classic mixed racial features despite the blond hair.

  “This building has a service basement,” she told him. “Where’s the nearest access?”

  “I…think it’s this way, ma’am,” he said quickly. “Follow me.”

  “Keep searching,” she ordered her staff. “Damien?”

  “Go,” he said softly. “I need to touch base with Romanov.”

  She nodded to him and followed Chun out into the corridor.

  “The maintenance accesses are locked,” he told her as he led the way. “I’m not sure if Raptis had a key.” He paused. “Um. I don’t have a key.”

  Reaching the door, Amiri studied it. It was a perfectly normal-looking door, with a small maintenance personnel only, keep out sign above the lock.

  “I don’t need one,” she told him, pulling out an auto-picking device and slapping it onto the lock. It wouldn’t work on anything particularly secure, but against the locks a maintenance door was secu
red with, it took less than a second.

  The youth stared at her in surprise as she stepped through into the stairwell and descended into the depths of the building. She replaced the auto-picker with another tool she’d learned to use as a bounty hunter, and acquired an even better version of as a Secret Service team leader: a thermal scanner calibrated for footprints.

  In the busy corridors above, it would have been useless. Here, where only a handful of maintenance staff came through in any given day, it showed the thirty-minute-old trail leading down clearly.

  “You stay here,” she ordered the kid. The last thing she needed was a teenage anchor as she chased down their only lead to the Keepers.

  Once the boy was out of sight, she drew her sidearm. Raptis probably wasn’t a threat—but he was a Mage and she wasn’t.

  The single trail of footprints led her through the surprisingly clean mechanical rooms of the CCU administration building, crossing several other, older tracks as they went, until they finally ended at what looked like a plain concrete wall.

  It was possible that the Rune Scribe had teleported through, but the footprints went right up to it. Running the thermal scanner over the wall suggested the presence of a door but gave no clue how to open it.

  She sighed. Most likely, it was a radioed command code from the professor’s PC, which meant they were going to need explosives. By the time they got the tunnel open, their prey would be a long, long way away.

  Chapter 41

  “What’s your status, Romanov?”

  The Hand’s voice echoed in Denis’s helmet, sealed away from the noise of his people loading into the shuttle.

  “I have half a platoon on a shuttle ready to go and another three squads loading,” he replied. “I can have eighty men on your position in twenty minutes. Ten if we have the clearance for a combat drop.”

  Montgomery chuckled.

  “I’m on a college campus, Mage-Captain,” he replied. “I don’t expect to need an assault landing. Do you have word from your people guarding Christoffsen?”