Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Should you be going to protect His Majesty?” Denis asked.

  “I’m in contact with Guard Control,” she reported. “They have battery power, but the thorium fission plants are supposed to provide our final emergency power source. The Mage-King is secure, the Throne Room is secure, the kids are with him. If the King is in the Throne Room, any attack on him won’t work.

  “Frankly, Mage-Captain, you and the Professor are more vulnerable, and since the Professor just cracked open the damn Keepers like a crab dinner, I think everyone would prefer we kept him alive.”

  “Wait,” Denis said slowly, “you think someone knocked out power to the entire complex as a preamble to attacking us?”

  “It’s sufficiently likely that I’ve been ordered to secure the Archives and protect Dr. Christoffsen,” she said calmly. “Just in case.”

  Chapter 43

  There was no subtlety to arriving in a shuttle, even a small unarmed runabout like the one Damien had taken to Curiosity City. The spacecraft came screaming in on the coordinates Wong had identified, still traveling at the speed of sound as they entered the parcel of land belonging to the Octavian family in the middle of a planetary park.

  “I’m not seeing anything here,” Amiri told him from the copilot’s seat. “Just…trees.”

  “Slowing down over the last spot the satellites had the chopper,” he replied, looking out through the cockpit as the shuttle came to something more reasonable as he looped around. “Wait—what’s that?”

  “That” was a glint of metal through the trees. His bodyguard had clearly seen it as well and started tapping commands on the screen as he directed the shuttle in the direction of the glint.

  “Son of a bitch,” she murmured as he brought the shuttle through a break in the trees and into a hover above a three-quarters-full vehicle park.

  A helicopter—presumably the one whose trail they’d followed—still sat in the middle of a concrete landing pad. Half a dozen robotic tow trucks sat silently off to one side, and a cleared zone tucked against the side of the mountain held another five choppers and half a dozen shuttles identical to the one Damien was piloting.

  “Those are all government spacecraft,” Damien said quietly. “We found our target.”

  “This thing has no guns,” she told him. “That’s a lot of vehicles to leave behind you.”

  “It’s an orbital shuttle,” he reminded her. “It doesn’t need guns for this.”

  With a carefully calculated course, he swept the spacecraft down through the vehicle park, suspending the shuttle barely five meters above the ground and directed the thrusters at each vehicle as he swept over.

  On full power at that range, engines that could lift the craft from the ground to orbit melted steel and overheated ceramics to the point of shattering. The shuttles had apparently been at least partially fueled, as explosions buffeted Damien’s craft as he swept back around, making certain none of the vehicles were intact.

  No one was going to escape today. After Andala, after Keeper of Oaths and the dead aboard Duke of Magnificence…the Keepers would surrender or be destroyed.

  “Got a bead on the entrance?” he asked.

  “There’s a path leading up the mountain,” Amiri replied. “It’s the only manmade feature I can see, so I’m guessing that’s the way to our door.”

  Damien adjusted the shuttle, landing the slightly scorched but intact spacecraft in a clear space away from the wrecked vehicles around him.

  “We’ve already knocked. Let’s go find the door.”

  #

  Once they were outside and on the ground, the path leading up the mountain was clear and obvious. Someone had put a lot of effort into cultivating and trimming the trees around the landing pad and vehicle park to conceal the facility as much as possible. If they hadn’t known exactly where the helicopter had disappeared, Damien wasn’t sure they could have found the place.

  The path was similarly concealed but was a smoothly paved straight line under the trees. It ascended smoothly up the mountainside, though the tree canopy arching over it blocked his view of the destination.

  There were no signs, no people. The only noise was the crackling fires of the wrecked vehicles. He’d have to call the site into the Park Rangers once they were done to make sure the fire didn’t spread, but for now…

  Silence.

  He looked up the path, absently recognizing the natural beauty of the place the Keepers had made their own. Damien suspected what waited for him inside their base. He didn’t want to be right, but he steeled himself for it anyway.

  “Julia,” he said quietly, gesturing Amiri to him. “I want you to take your people and fly the shuttle back to Olympus Mons. The autopilot can handle that.”

  “Not a chance,” she replied sharply. “You need us to watch your back.”

  “Not today.” He shook his head. “Julia, you’re one of the few who know what it means for a Rune Wright to go to war. I can’t be responsible for your safety.”

  “You’ll still die if someone shoots you in the back of the head.”

  “And if I and whoever I end up fighting start throwing antimatter around?” he asked softly. “I can protect myself, but if I’m protecting you and your people as well, I might just get us all killed.”

  “Until this case is done, my job is to keep you alive,” she snapped. “I will not abandon you.”

  “Your part in this case is done,” he stated flatly. “Julia, I don’t need you for this. Having you here will put both you and me at risk. Go. You can help more at Olympus Mons than here—and you can make sure that whatever happens, His Majesty knows where this place is.”

  “And if you die?”

  “Then I died doing my job and I didn’t take you with me,” Damien told her. “You’ve watched my back for a long time, Julia. I don’t even know how many lives I owe you, but you can’t watch my back today. I need you to go back to the Mountain and tell Desmond what we’ve found.

  “I need you to go back to Ardennes, no matter what happens, and help Riordan put his planet back together,” he admitted. “This… This is up to me.”

  “Why?” she demanded. She wasn’t arguing anymore—both of them knew it was an order he would not permit her to refuse.

  “Because unless I’m severely mistaken, I’m going to find a Hand in there,” he told her quietly. “And that’s something we need to deal with in the family.”

  #

  As Damien stepped under the trees, the shuttle engines roared to life behind him. The little runabout was designed to function entirely without a pilot. Its computer was entirely capable of taking Amiri and her people back to Olympus Mons on its own, which meant they would be safe.

  His own fate was an entirely different question.

  The path was wide and clear, obviously carefully maintained—probably by robots, from the ruler-straight edges of the shrubs and lower branches that touched it. The evening sunlight was streaming through the canopy, tinging the concrete path with a calming shade of green as he made his way up the side of the mountain.

  It was incongruous at best. Damien was here to fight a war, to end a conspiracy that had killed people under his command, tried to kill thousands of innocents—had killed God alone knew how many people protecting their secrets.

  But the path leading up to their secret library was a soothing, relaxing place that managed to do nothing for his peace of mind. Knowing what was coming made it creepy.

  Finally, after about a quarter-kilometer, he reached the end of the path. An opening had been cut into the side of the mountain with magic, angled to be invisible from above, containing a large set of double doors surmounted by a sigil of a mailed fist holding a scroll.

  The symbol was the only sign he was in the right place. There was no text, no explanation, just a set of armored doors in the middle of nowhere with that symbol carved into the stone above them.

  His arrival had not been subtle. He was a little surprised nothing had tried to shoot at
him on approach, but he had certainly made his presence known. The Keepers knew he was there. They knew who he was, more than any enemy he’d ever faced, he suspected.

  With a deep inhalation and a surge of magic, Damien Montgomery, Hand of the Mage-King of Mars, blew the doors apart and strode into the lair of his enemy.

  Chapter 44

  Damien had no idea if the doors had been locked, but they had been armored to withstand almost any conventional weapon. Converting half a gram or so of the metal at the exact center of the door to antimatter, however, was far more than any mundane material could withstand.

  He strode through the shattered wreckage of the doors, summoning shields of force around himself to stop any bullets from unexpected corners. The shields couldn’t be sustained forever, but while he held them, it would take more than a bullet to the head to stop him.

  The double doors led into a small antechamber with another set of doors at the other end. The space was carved out of the raw rock, with gentle lighting showing delicate woodland murals painted across the smoothed stone. The inner doors were armored to the same level as the outer doors and he glanced around for defenses.

  There weren’t any. Just the doors. With a gesture, he blew those apart inwards, clearing his immediate path, and stepped over the debris into an immense open lobby.

  If the space had started as a natural cavern, there was no sign of it anymore. Easily two hundred meters long and fifteen high, supported by immense pillars and marked with second- and third-floor galleries, the space looked like it should be the heart of a museum, not the entrance to a secret underground base. It was massive enough that the debris from the wrecked doors hadn’t actually touched anything in the room.

  Mirrored airshafts in the roof delivered sunshine, diffusing a mix of natural and artificial light to fully illuminate the massive space with a consistent level of light that glittered off glass cases and covered bookshelves.

  The place was a museum. Artifacts and books that no one outside this deathly secret order had ever seen or even known existed. Knowledge hidden away—Damien couldn’t even guess how important it was, how much knowledge of the origins of magic had been concealed from humanity.

  There were hundreds of hiding places in the room and he held his shields as he walked forward into the center of the room. He could feel the eyes on him, and he stopped in the middle of the room and waited.

  His Sight told him he wasn’t alone. Even amidst the runic artifacts hidden in the cases, he could See the runes of the Mages around him…and the Rune of Power ahead of him.

  “I know you’re here,” he said aloud. “I know you know what I am, so that can’t be a surprise.

  “Your ‘Royal Order’ is guilty of treason and mass murder,” he continued. “If you lay down your arms and submit to the Mage-King’s justice, he may be merciful. Yield or be destroyed.”

  For a long moment, silence was his only answer and he began to reach for his power. If they would not answer, then he would make them.

  Then the Rune of Power ahead of him shifted. A black-clad figure emerged from behind a column on the second floor gallery and jumped the railing. With the tiniest of bursts of magic, Charlotte Ndosi landed gently on the floor in front of him.

  He’d guessed.

  No. He’d known. Lomond had clearly known nothing, and yet everything suggested there was a Hand on Mars funneling the Keepers information. If it wasn’t Lomond and it wasn’t Damien, then Ndosi was the only option.

  “I’d hoped it wasn’t you,” he said quietly.

  “This still doesn’t have to end in violence,” she replied.

  “Only if you lay down your arms and surrender,” Damien told her. “Your Order has gone too far. Bombarding a planet? Ambushing a Hand? Launching missiles in Mars local space?!”

  “I doubt it matters, but no one here knew what Octavian was doing,” Ndosi replied. “And I don’t have a goddamn clue who put those missiles there, Damien. But you’ve chased us since you came back, and I swore an oath to defend the secrets of this Order.”

  “Even from your King?” he demanded. “Even to the point of attacking Olympus Mons?”

  “A distraction,” she told him. “We wanted to take Christoffsen into custody, try and convince him to see our side, but you’d wrapped too much security around him. We needed to keep the rest of the Mountain away from our capture team.”

  She sighed.

  “If it makes you feel any better, those capture teams were called off when you started slagging our escape vehicles. The whole point in neutralizing Dr. Christoffsen, after all, was to stop him leading you to here, and the distraction will help us evacuate the place anyway.”

  “What is this place?” he asked.

  “The Secret Library, the place where we stored everything Desmond Michael Alexander felt he had to keep hidden. He was right,” she concluded. “You don’t know what you’ve scratched the surface of, Damien. You could destroy the Protectorate if you unveiled what we protect.

  “Please…join us,” she asked. “We could explain everything. You will understand then.”

  Her eyes said, unspoken, that they could be together then.

  “Lawrence Octavian dropped kinetic weapons on an archaeological dig site,” Damien said quietly. “Your ‘Winton’, whatever his real name is, kidnapped and threatened an eighteen-year-old girl to force me to talk to him. Hell, he offered me the Throne in the Mountain. Threatened the Mage-King of Mars to whom we both owe our allegiance.

  “Your Order, whatever its reason, whatever its purpose, has gone too far. It’s over, Hand Ndosi. Stand down or be destroyed.”

  “I swore an oath, Damien,” she said quietly. “And like you said, we know what you are.”

  She gestured for him to look behind him.

  The Mages emerged from behind columns on each level. At least twenty, all marked with the projector rune of a Combat Mage. Against any conventional threat, even against a Hand, it was overkill—especially backed by a Hand. Against Damien… He wasn’t sure even he could win that fight.

  “Please, Damien,” she said softly. “We serve the same cause; we just have more information than you do. There’s a reason this stuff is secret.”

  “A Hand threatening another Hand,” Damien replied. “An attack on the Mountain by our own people. What would Alaura have said?”

  Ndosi winced. Alaura Stealey had recruited and trained them both. She’d been one of the best Hands of their generation in Damien’s opinion, and she would have been heartbroken to learn one of her pupils had fallen this deeply into treason.

  The other Hand looked conflicted for a long moment. As she opened her mouth to say something, however, several of the Mages took advantage of Damien’s distraction.

  Out of nowhere, fire and lightning hammered his shields, the force sending him flying even as his shield absorbed enough heat and kinetic energy to protect him from harm.

  Steadying himself behind his shield, he summoned the full array of his power. The time for talking was over.

  #

  More fire lashed across the room with deadly focus, the deadly beams ripping into the column Damien had landed behind as he took cover. His shields were strong, but against twenty Mages, even a Rune Wright could sustain a defense for only so long.

  His attackers reacted to his attempt to hide by opening fire with grenade launchers. They were very willing to wreck their own library to kill him, it seemed.

  At least half a dozen of the weapons bounced around the corner toward him, but he deflected them away with a blast of force and charged after them. The explosions covered his emergence from behind the stone column, allowing him to quickly assess the threats.

  The Mages were working in teams of five, focusing both magical and weapons fire on particular locations as they tried to sweep him. Ndosi was on her own, but her Rune made her the largest threat. She hadn’t, so far as he could tell, attacked him yet…and even in the middle of a battle, he couldn’t bring himself to strike first
against a woman he’d slept with.

  Instead, he targeted the team of Mages on the third-floor gallery. Power surged through him and he ripped the balcony from the walls, flinging a hundred tons of stone—and five Mages—across the room at another of the teams, crushing eight of his attackers with a single strike.

  “He’s moving!” a voice screamed. “Take him!”

  Twelve beams of force and fired slammed into his shields simultaneously, a skilled unison that drove him back once more. He gave way a few steps, preparing another attack—and then a brutally powerful force strike slammed through Mages’ attacks, flinging him off his feet and against the wall.

  He’d never fought a Hand before, and he struggled against the sheer power of Ndosi’s will for a moment. Even under the pressure of her attack, however, he was able to stop her Mages’ attacks from reaching him—and theirs, unlike the Hand’s, were lethal strikes.

  Ndosi was still trying to take him alive. She should have known better.

  Damien focused power and turned his shield into a mirror, reflecting every attack back in a flash of magic that overrode the other Mages’ control of their Gifts. The reflection lasted bare moments and took more energy than jumping a starship, but faced with this many Mages, it worked.

  Energy hammered into walls and pillars, most of his attackers dodging or defending themselves. Despite a growing sense of fatigue, he followed up the deflection with strikes of his own, tight beams of superheated plasma that cut through magical shields, flesh, and the stone of the columns they tried to hide behind.

  One of the columns collapsed under the strain as his attacks sliced through it, its unimaginable weight ripping it free from the roof as it was severed from the base. Hundreds of tons of stone crashed to the floor of the massive chamber, the ground itself shaking, glass cases and bookshelf fronts shattering in a crescendo of noise.