Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  “I’ve checked in with Mage-Lieutenant Forbes,” Denis told his boss. “They’ve been allowing the academics back in, but it’s been quiet. No issues, though the Professor doesn’t seem to have found anything either.”

  He’d also, from what Andrea Forbes had said, started trying to use the Marines as research assistants. Since RMMC Marines tended to be capable and smart, most of them seemed to be taking it in good humor as an educational opportunity. Since Mage-Lieutenant Forbes was even more capable and smarter than her Marines, she’d assigned the ones who weren’t taking it well as outer security.

  “Julia is following her instincts from her bounty hunter days,” Montgomery told him. “I expect her to find something useful—at least, more useful than I’m finding in the man’s office—but I don’t expect to catch Professor Raptis at this point. We won’t need backup here beyond MIS data-crunching.

  “I want you to reinforce Professor Christoffsen’s protection,” the Hand ordered. “I’m hoping he’s found something useful in the last few days, but I’m afraid that if he has, he’s a target. Drop that first squad ASAP. You’re not cleared for combat, but you are cleared to emergency-override Olympus Control. Understand?”

  “Yes, my lord,” Denis replied, already thinking through the risks. The academics probably weren’t a threat, but if someone had the ability to change the bookings, they could have sneaked their own people in.

  “We’ll keep the Professor safe,” he promised.

  “Good. Let me know once you’re in place,” the Hand ordered.

  Letting the channel close, Denis smiled and opened an intercom to the pilot. She’d be unlikely to complain about the change in plans—how often, after all, did a pilot get to override ground control?

  #

  Four shuttles dropped from the transfer station like homesick rocks, targeting the landing pad closest to the Archive chambers where Christoffsen was working. It wasn’t quite a combat landing—but it was enough that the civilian shuttles carrying the visiting Councilors’ staff were being cut off before they complained.

  “This is Olympus Mons,” the controller snapped. “You can’t just charge down from orbit and tell us to ‘make it happen’!”

  “Control, I’m operating on the direct authority of Hand Montgomery, who has identified a potential threat to the security of the Protectorate,” Romanov told the woman. After half a dozen go-arounds, the pilot had dumped Control on him and focused on flying. “I know we’re not exactly used to emergencies here, but the Hand has that authority and I will fulfill my orders.

  “We’re not going to hit anyone on the way down, but I suggest you give my pilots as much of a safety zone as you can,” he continued gently. “My Marines will be on the ground in fifteen.”

  “You can’t just land Marines at Olympus Mons.”

  Denis smiled.

  “I suggest you check with His Majesty whether or not he included that in his Hand’s authority,” he pointed out, “but either way, we’re landing.”

  #

  Denis led the way off of the shuttle onto the cooling tarmac and found a single soldier in red exosuit armor waiting for him. There was no insignia on the armor, but the Marine Mage-Captain came to attention and saluted the wearer anyway.

  The Royal Guardsman might have a rank technically junior to his, but there were thousands of Marine Captains across the Protectorate. There were only two hundred Royal Guards—all of them fully trained Combat Mages, all of them Marines of at least ten years’ service, as many of them as possible combat veterans.

  The Royal Guard was the mailed fist behind the silk glove of the Secret Service, and they never left Olympus Mons unless the Mage-King did.

  “Guardsman Han,” the exosuit introduced herself. “Mage-Captain, what is the situation?”

  “We have reason to believe that the conspiracy Montgomery is tracking has infiltrated the Mountain and may be moving on Professor Christoffsen to prevent him communicating his discoveries to the Hand.”

  Han nodded once.

  “We are not maintaining any particular surveillance on the Professor,” she noted. “I believe you have a platoon already guarding him?” A small hand gesture took in the four shuttles, each carrying an entire squad of Marines, behind Denis.

  “And given the intelligence these people seem to have had all along, they’ll be ready for that,” he pointed out.

  “I see your point,” Han allowed. “You don’t need my permission,” she continued, “but the Captain wanted to make sure we knew what was going on. Care for some company?”

  A full company of Marines, three Combat Mages…versus an unknown level of threat from an organization that had commanded at least one Hand and a capital ship built to custom specifications.

  “I would love some company, Guardsman.”

  #

  The Archives were much busier now than they had been when Denis had visited the Hand and Professor during their first phase of research. His platoon was scattered throughout the room, some on guard duty, some on more academic pursuits.

  The Marines were in the majority in the room, but there were still at least thirty researchers of one stripe or another, digging through papers, hard storage, and the information databases. The arrival of a new group of Marines started to draw attention as his people made their way in.

  The Archive was huge, and even filing over another eighty Marines in body armor and carrying carbines into the space didn’t noticeably crowd it. His people knew their brief and immediately moved to secure entrances and exits, unboxed cased heavy weapons and set up barricades even as the academics started to recoil away from them.

  Ignoring the researchers—identifying if any of them where a threat was Kozel’s job—Denis crossed the old library cavern to where he spotted Forbes and Christoffsen still at the same set of consoles the Professor had started on weeks before.

  “Good to see you, boss,” Forbes greeted him. “Did you have an overdue book?”

  “Not this week,” he replied seriously. “Professor Christoffsen, please tell me you have something?”

  “About a hundred and twenty Marines tramping around the library,” the old ex-Governor turned political aide said dryly. “And while I have learned quite a good deal about the origins of our enemy, I have learned nothing of immediate use.”

  “Damn,” Denis muttered. “Montgomery was hoping,” he admitted. “Our biggest lead on Mars evaporated; he was hoping for context that could help us find something.”

  “Context I can give you,” Christoffsen replied. “But I’m not sure knowing that the Keepers were created by direct order of the first Mage-King in Twenty-Two Sixty helps us find them. I can tell you they were a creation of the early days of the Protectorate, and that they took a lot of the Eugenicists’ files from this place,” he waved a hand around the Archives. “None of that is useful, however.”

  “How were they funded?” Han asked. Denis glanced at the red-armored Guardsman.

  “Sorry?” he asked.

  “The Guard were quietly briefed on the Keepers after Montgomery returned,” she said softly. “They have a lot of resources, and they’re not being funded by the Protectorate—not without having co-opted an entire army of auditors, anyway.

  “If the Mage-King wanted them kept secret, he would have provided them with some of kind of funding arrangement. What was it?”

  “Follow the money,” Christoffsen said aloud. “I didn’t think of it—I looked to see if anyone was benefiting today but not how they were being funded. The ship was paid for out of Octavian’s personal funds, and I have ten of said auditors trying to see if anyone paid him back for it, but…”

  He shook his head, turning to one of the Marines with him.

  “Shelly, fetch me the second datachip from yesterday,” he told her. “It was a blue one, archival of land grants under the Terraforming Agency.”

  “You already searched that, though,” she replied, though she went digging for it obediently regardless.

/>   “I was looking for the wrong thing,” Christoffsen said sharply, his voice distressed. “I didn’t think—dammit, I know the date the King created them.”

  The young Marine found the blue chip and the older man slotted it into the reader, warming up his data searches.

  There was nothing Denis could do to help with that, so he glanced around the Archive, checking the status of his people. The defenses weren’t perfect—the room wasn’t particularly defensible—but unless he was facing Mages and exosuits, they would hold.

  “There! There!” the Professor exclaimed. He threw a map up on the display and stabbed at a point on it.

  “January fifteenth, two thousand two hundred and sixty,” he announced aloud. “All of the land grants that day were made in the Hellas Montes.”

  “The Hellas Montes are a planetary park,” Forbes objected. “There’s nothing there except a few tourist traps.”

  “And in the heart of the park, five hundred square kilometers that were granted to Caleb Octavian and then transferred into a holding company that has never done anything with them,” Christoffsen replied. “No roads enter the area. None of the tourist traps are near it. It’s in the middle of nowhere, where no one would ever go. Where else would you hide a secret library?”

  “That’s a huge area,” Denis said quietly. “I’m not sure that’s enough.”

  “It’s a starting point,” Christoffsen said. “I’m relaying to Montgomery now.”

  A few keystrokes later and the old man leaned back, the excitement fading as he exhaled.

  “Not as much of an answer as I hoped, but more than we had,” he said aloud. “It’s been transmitted. Down to the Hand now. If they wanted to stop me, Mage-Captain, they are too late now.”

  And then the entire mountain trembled beneath their feet and the lights went out.

  Chapter 42

  “Fire in the hole!”

  Damien felt the ground tremble and waited for the MIS demo team to check the area before going around the corner himself. The overly neat basement of the CCU building was now covered in concrete dust, and the secret door Amiri had found had been blasted off its hinges.

  The other side looked like a…garage. It was dustier and clearly less well maintained than the basement behind them, but it had clearly held a vehicle of some kind for a long time. A dimly lit tunnel stretched away from them, marked with a clear set of tire tracks in the dirt.

  “Find where this comes out,” he ordered.

  “Yes, sir,” the Martian Investigation Service team lead replied, gesturing one of his people forward with a small airborne drone. “It’s probably not too far,” he concluded. “Maybe two klicks at most; more than that would be unsafe.”

  And two kilometers would have put Raptis well outside the perimeter established by the Curiosity City cops.

  He called Director Wong and quickly filled her in.

  “We’ll try and backtrack the time once we have the exit point,” she told him after she’d processed it. “But…that line goes through downtown. If it emerges into a parking garage, without knowing what the vehicle looks like, we won’t have much of a trail.

  “Find what you can, Director,” he replied. “I don’t demand the impossible, merely the extremely difficult.”

  “We’ll do what we must. I have a team breaking down the door of Raptis’s house as we speak. We’ll rip the place apart; hopefully, we’ll find some kind of clue.”

  “Hopefully,” Damien echoed. “I don’t suppose we have full records of aerial travel?”

  “We can scan them, but there’s enough private short-range flight that we can’t guarantee an unscheduled flight was a risk.”

  “Check,” he ordered. “We’ll want to investigate them anyway.”

  “We’ll find Raptis, my lord,” she promised. “This is Mars. No one can evade us here.”

  Damien wasn’t sure he believed that anymore, but he nodded anyway.

  #

  Damien had returned to his shuttle, studying what information he had and trying to decide his next move, when the datapulse arrived. Anything from Christoffsen was flagged for his immediate attention, and he threw it onto the shuttle’s cockpit screen to study what the old man had sent.

  The cover note was short and abrupt, noting that the land parcel shown had been transferred to the ex-Eugenicist Caleb Octavian—Lawrence Octavian’s great-great-great-grandfather—on the same date that the Royal Order of the Keepers of Secrets and Oaths had been created by order of the first Mage-King.

  “Director Wong,” he raised the MIS woman again. “I need you to run a satellite scan for me.”

  “We’re still digging through the data for flights leaving here,” she replied. “What do you need?”

  “I’m sending you an area of the Hellas Montes Park,” he told her. “Did any of those unscheduled aircraft go there?”

  She was silent for a long moment.

  “Yes,” she said finally. “This makes no sense, my lord. A helicopter left a downtown rooftop helipad roughly as you were arriving at the University. They went directly into the park and appear to have landed…but there’s nothing there. Just…wilderness.”

  “Give me the coordinates,” Damien ordered. “Then…continue your investigation of the house and the tunnel, but I think you can mostly stand down. If you’ve got where Raptis landed, your part in this is done.”

  “We’ll remain on standby regardless,” Wong told him. “We’ll see what we find.”

  It was time to call in the Marines. Romanov was busy, but it wasn’t like Duke of Magnificence didn’t have two other Marine companies he could call on. He was reaching out to raise Mage-Captain Jakab when a planetwide alert slammed onto his wrist PC.

  “This is Admiral Amanda Caliver aboard Defender of Mars,” the voice of the woman in charge of the orbiting battleships announced, and he realized that every military and police comm on the planet was receiving the transmission. “The Mountain is under attack. Unknown forces have disabled both the geothermal and fusion power plants in Olympus Mons, crippling the interior and exterior defenses.

  “A secondary series of attacks appear to have disabled Olympus City’s power plants as well.

  “I am declaring a humanitarian and security crisis. All military personnel are to report to base immediately. All police forces are to move to secure their local areas and stand by to provide support to OCPD and the Royal Marines.

  “We will be launching Marine landings into Olympus City and to reinforce the Mountain’s defenders immediately. Stand by for individual instructions via your local chain of command.

  “Until further notice, Mars is now under martial law.”

  And Damien Montgomery was not getting his Marines or police backup.

  He’d been worried about an attack on Christoffsen. He’d forgotten that Winton had threatened the Mage-King.

  #

  Julia listened to the message and, without a word aloud, gestured for her Secret Service agents to follow her into the shuttle. They settled in behind her as she dropped in beside Montgomery.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked.

  “We should head to Olympus Mons, make sure Desmond and the rest are safe,” he replied slowly.

  “And would you, powerful as you are, make a difference when the Mage-King is surrounded by hundreds of Marines and Secret Service Agents and the Royal Guard? Hell, Desmond himself is a walking weapon of mass destruction.”

  “If the King is under attack, we have a duty.”

  “And what if that’s what the Keepers are counting on?” she told him. From what she could tell, the Hand was closing in on the bastards who’d bombed Andala and killed Kurosawa. They had to be running scared. “If they’re keeping secrets, they probably have records of some kind? The kind they’d need a huge distraction to move without people noticing?”

  “A distraction like martial law and having every man and woman in uniform on the goddamn planet watching the Mountain,” he said quietly.

&nb
sp; “Exactly. Damien, our King is probably safe and certainly doesn’t need you,” she pointed out. Her charge had a bad habit of swinging between thinking he was completely unimportant and thinking he had to solve everything.

  “But no one else has all the pieces we’ve put together,” she continued. “What if they’re running scared? How close are we?”

  “We have them,” he admitted quietly. “Christoffsen tracked a land grant that was buried in the middle of a park, made to the first Mage Octavian—a defected Eugenicist. It was made the same day that the Keepers were established.

  “A chopper left here without a flight plan and headed right to that land grant. I have coordinates that I think are their base. Their home. Most likely their records, as you say.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” she demanded. “This shuttle has enough fuel to make it to orbit and back twice; we can do a nice short suborbital, can’t we?”

  “We can.”

  “Then let’s go end this fucking case so I can go get married, shall we?”

  He chuckled.

  “Strap in, people,” he ordered. “Apparently, our bride-to-be is getting impatient.”

  #

  Hand lights flickered to life across the Archives, accompanied by panicked questions and shouting from the researchers, none of whom had expected to see the perfectly safe underground cavern have any problems.

  “What’s going on?” was the primary refrain.

  “Everyone, shut up!” Denis bellowed. “Lights to the center, check on the civilians. Perimeter teams, go thermal. Watch the doors, watch your backs,” he ordered.

  With some order beginning to form around him, he turned his attention back to Christoffsen and Guardsman Han.

  “What happened?” he asked the exosuited soldier.

  “Something cut the primary, secondary, and tertiary power systems,” she reported. “The trembling was explosives collapsing the boreholes for the geothermal plant. I’m not sure what shut down the fusion and fission plants, but given that the thorium reactors’ existence is classified, that’s concerning on its own.”