Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) Read online

  Alien Arcana

  By Glynn Stewart

  Copyright 2016 by Glynn Stewart

  All rights reserved. This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons— living or dead— is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art Copyright 2016 by Jack Giesen

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 1

  Professor Yoshi Kurosawa, Mage, Rune Scribe, and holder of PhDs in xenoarchaeology from several of Mars’s most prestigious universities, would not have described himself as bored. He had an entire centuries-old alien facility to investigate.

  But after a year in the Andala System, digging through the scraps and the wreckage of what had once been someone’s refueling station, Yoshi was starting to wish they would find something interesting.

  The Rune Scribe was on Andala IV because the ruin there was the only evidence humanity had ever found of aliens with interstellar travel—and humanity only traveled the stars by the magic of the Jump Mages and their runic jump matrices.

  He’d hoped, when he’d agreed to the placement, to find alien runes in the wreckage. The complex wasn’t small, after all. Six domes, each over six hundred meters across, on top of an underground structure that stretched dozens of levels into the ground.

  It had been a refueling station once. They hadn’t found any evidence of gas extraction facilities at the gas giant in the system, but the ruins had once contained massive, billion-liter tanks of hydrogen. Their contents were long evaporated now, but the tanks remained.

  Checking his breather, Yoshi wandered deeper into the ruins. While the humans had attached a prefabricated habitat to the alien dome that had been the focus of their investigations so far, the planet’s atmosphere was toxic to humans. There was enough oxygen in it to be breathed, though, so simply filtering out the high carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide content was enough for humans to survive.

  The domes were mostly intact and had shielded their interior structures and the underground tunnels from the planet’s weather. Over three years of investigation, the archaeologists had cleared and cataloged twelve floors and subbasements of three of the domes.

  Water and collapsed tunnels had stopped them going deeper. The current plan was to clear and catalog every dome as deep as they could go, which frustrated Yoshi to no end.

  He’d seen the drone video of the rest of the complex. There were no runes there, not even where there should be. No gravity runes. No defensive spells. No emergency atmospheric magic. None of the things that humanity would have included in this facility.

  It was possible, of course, that the aliens did have a technological method of faster-than-light travel, in which case they wouldn’t have the magic that Yoshi wanted to find. Except that the technology they had found was no more advanced than humanity’s—cruder, in many cases, than modern human tech.

  Yoshi wasn’t supposed to come down and stare at the collapsed tunnels leading deeper into the alien base. As he was one of the most senior scientists and the only Mage in the research team, though, there wasn’t really anyone to tell him not to.

  The walls around him were smooth rock, either cut or smoothed by lasers long enough before that humanity hadn’t even had the technology. Some failure of design or intervention of nature in the centuries since had first bowed and then shattered the roof of the curving stairwell leading deeper into the underground complex.

  Magic twitched in his hands, the Gift of his Martian bloodline itching to serve his curiosity, and Yoshi laughed softly to himself. Opening up the lower levels would take time and energy for the rest of the expedition. They would bring in heavy equipment and carefully remove the rubble, shoring up the roof with supports and bracing.

  He could just…open it.

  There were a hundred reasons why he shouldn’t, but at that moment, deep in the bowels of an alien base that utterly refused to reveal its secrets to him, none of them came to mind.

  Softly humming to himself through the breather, Yoshi gave in to temptation. Power flowed through his body as he carefully considered the debris, continuing to hum as he reached out his hands and unleashed the energies he commanded.

  Yoshi Kurosawa was a Martian-born Mage by Blood, born to one of the oldest families of Mages and descended directly from the survivors of the Eugenicists’ Project Olympus. For all that he was an old man now and had been an academic his entire life, he was a powerful Mage.

  The fallen stones bent to his will. They lifted, adjusting and merging together to form a new supporting archway through the debris. It wasn’t large, just enough for Yoshi himself to walk through, and he wasn’t a tall man.

  A few minutes of magic, an exertion of will no one else in the research team could match, and a tired-but-pleased Yoshi walked through his new tunnel to see what secrets the debris had hidden.

  At first, his light fell on the same smoothed stone and ancient light fixtures that had been present on the other side of the cave-in, but he hadn’t expected anything different.

  Carefully and gently, he walked deeper into spaces where no human had ever set foot. His breather warned him the air here was different from outside. Staler. It still had enough oxygen for the machine to function, though, so he carried on.

  Turning a corner, however, he stepped into an open gallery, and his breather calmly informed him it was now redundant. Surprised, he checked the readings on the device through his wrist computer. The air still wasn’t perfect for human consumption, but it was far closer than it had been even a few steps back. The carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide had been reduced to levels that wouldn’t harm him.

  Yoshi looked around him. Someone, long before, had gone to a lot of effort to make the gallery look as welcoming as a two-hundred-meter-long cavern could. He stood on a balcony around a third floor, looking down at a floor ten meters below, centered around what had clearly been some kind of fountain. Murals of strange and alien trees, now flaking and faded, had been painted on the walls.

  Part of the roof had collapsed at some point in the intervening centuri
es, leaving debris scattered across what had once been some kind of market concourse, but this had clearly been a place for rest and relaxation for visiting ships’ crews—and had been set up to preserve atmosphere somehow.

  Yoshi knelt next to the murals, brushing aside debris and dirt as he searched for what he knew had to be there. No technological solution could have lasted this long.

  It wasn’t in the murals, he realized after a moment. It was in the safety railing. The safety barrier around the balcony had been laser-carved from the original stone, and the top layer then bleached white—and inlaid with familiar silver runes.

  “Yes!” Yoshi shouted aloud, pulling his camera around to take pictures and record everything. It wasn’t much—just a simple spell to maintain atmosphere in this massive space—but they were runes. Still-functioning runes of an alien race.

  He was starting to salivate over the potential lessons humanity could learn from studying a completely different species’s approach to magic when his computer happily started popping up recognition notes for the matrix.

  He stared in shock as his computer happily translated the matrix into normal human diagram summaries. It recognized the symbols. That was impossible.

  Dropping to his knees once more, Yoshi Kurosawa studied the silver inlay with a critical eye. Looking for it now, he saw what his computer, following its basic programming, had seen instantly. The runes weren’t alien. They weren’t even just similar to the Martian Runic script humanity used.

  It was Martian Runic.

  But no being of any kind had set foot in these buried lower levels since before humanity had relearned magic. They’d dated the debris—the tunnel he’d opened had collapsed before Martian Runic had been invented…which meant…

  “Damn,” a voice murmured softly behind him. “I’m sorry, Professor. I’d really hoped you wouldn’t find anything.”

  Yoshi jerked back to his feet, turning to find Samara Hollins behind him. His tall, athletic student wore the same breather as he did—but instead of carrying a light, she was wearing light-gathering optics. Military gear that would have enabled her to sneak through the abandoned base without being seen.

  “What are you doing here, Samara?” he asked, then shook it aside in the excitement of his discovery. “Come take a look at this,” he told her. “These runes! They’re Martian Runic—exactly. That means…”

  “I know,” she cut him off coldly. “I know what they are, I know what that means. I don’t suppose I could convince you to stay quiet about this?”

  Yoshi stared at her in shock.

  “This is the find of a lifetime!” he snapped. “What can you possibly mean, stay quiet about it?!”

  In answer, his student conjured blue witch fire around her hands—burning off both the gloves she wore and another layer of skin-toned covering he’d never realized she wore. A chill ran down Yoshi’s spine as he realized Samara had a projector rune carved into her hand—a rune only given to Combat Mages.

  “You’re a Mage?” he demanded. “I don’t understand.”

  “I was sent here to make sure no one discovered what you just found, Professor,” she said sadly. “If you will not keep silent, then my orders are to silence you.”

  Witch fire flashed from her hand, but she’d talked for too long and Yoshi was no fool. A shield of frozen air flashed into existence between them, Yoshi backing away as he drew on half-forgotten training to try to defend himself.

  More fire hammered against his shield, and a tug of force tore his feet out from underneath him. The old professor fell, feeling his bones snap as he slammed into ancient stone.

  “I’m sorry, Professor,” Samara said gently. “But there are secrets I am sworn to keep.”

  Yoshi Kurosawa would not die on his knees. Power flashed through him, lines of force supporting old and broken limbs as he rose to his feet once more and attacked. Waves of pure force flashed across the space between them, throwing Samara back as he struggled to remain standing.

  She used magic to control her movement, twisting in the air to land on her feet like a cat and then sending more fire hammering back at him.

  Focused on standing, he’d dropped the shield. Witch fire hammered into his flesh, setting muscles and nerves alike on fire. Somehow, he remained up and flung lightning and force back at her.

  She dodged, sidestepping his wild attack with the ease of practice. Whatever Samara Hollins was, she was not a xenoarchaeology grad student!

  Her counterstrike hammered into a hastily raised shield, force and flame flinging him backward. Yoshi barely had time to realize the only thing behind him was the railing when he slammed the old carved stone with an echoing snap.

  It was only when his legs and hands refused to respond to him that he realized he’d snapped his back in multiple places against the safety railing. He tried to summon his magic, bring himself back to his knees, but only sputters of power answered him.

  Then he was rising, but not under his power. He looked down at Samara, who held him suspended in the air.

  “Dammit, Yoshi,” she whispered, “you could have been one of us.”

  Then she threw him over the balcony.

  Chapter 2

  Damien Montgomery, Hand of the Mage-King of Mars, found detention center interview rooms spectacularly creepy. He didn’t have particularly fond memories of them, though today was the first time he’d been on the interviewing side of one quite so reminiscent of his stay in a Corinthian cell so many years ago.

  The young woman sitting across from him would probably have looked small and harmless to most, but Damien was easily ten centimeters shorter than she and even skinnier. He didn’t underestimate his own threat level, so he doubted that Roslyn Chambers was as harmless as she looked.

  She sat silently, judging him in turn while probably wondering why she’d been summoned there. The closed golden fist of his symbol of office hung openly outside his suit, a stark contrast to the shapeless jumpsuit the Tau Ceti Landing City Juvenile Detention Center had stuck Chambers in.

  “Care to tell me why I’m here?” the girl demanded. According to the records Damien had been shown, she had turned eighteen in detention and was being released shortly, her youth sentence finally up.

  “You have an interesting record, Miss Chambers,” Damien told her in half-answer, projecting the details he’d been given onto the plain metal table from his wrist personal computer. “Let’s see.”

  He tapped a command, zooming through the list he’d read when Chambers’ counselor had sent it up to Damien’s ship with her request for a favor.

  “Brilliant student, pride of the Chambers family, one of Tau Ceti’s first and most famous Mage families,” he noted. “Until, at age fifteen, everything seemed to go to pieces. Four allegations of assault, one dropped, two settled out of court, and one where the individual tried to press charges. The note here suggests that after interviewing the witnesses, the young gentleman who tried to press charges ended up facing charges of his own.

  “Suspected association with an illegal Mage duel,” he continued. “Resulted in over fifty thousand in damages—paid by a third party, and the owners of the property declined afterwards to assist in the investigation.

  “No less than fourteen incidents of vandalism you were either linked to or implicated in, but, strangely, none of the damaged parties chose to press charges,” Damien noted dryly. “A curious Tau Ceti Bureau of Investigation officer turned up that the damaged parties were all compensated for damages in exchange for ironclad nondisclosure agreements.

  “And not quite lastly, seven counts of minor to moderate petty theft that the TCBI is sure of, all settled without police involvement,” he concluded.

  “I have to wonder, Miss Chambers, how many incidents aren’t in this file that your parents covered up before you stole—and wrecked—Royal Tester Karl Anders’s personal car while he was visiting their estate.”

  “Nothing except Anders’s car was ever proven,” Chambers told him, her nos
e elevated slightly as she managed to look down on him despite the fact she was handcuffed to a chair.

  “A pattern still emerges,” he pointed out. “What pattern do you see, Miss Chambers?”

  “That I’m handcuffed to a chair with a creepy dude reading my life story to me,” she replied. “What’s the damn point?”

  “I can tell you the pattern the Navy recruiter saw,” Damien said quietly. “Ninety-eight percentile in Practical Thaumaturgy. Ninety-fourth percentile in Thaumaturgic Theory. Average ninety-fifth in all secondary academic testing except Law and Ethics. Fifty-second percentile in Law and Ethics. A pattern of dysfunctional behavior covered up by your family.

  “Mages by Blood sometimes believe there are no consequences for their actions. Your parents tried to shield you from them, but the Royal Martian Navy is not blind, Miss Chambers.”

  She wilted in the chair.

  “All I ever got was ‘rejected’,” she admitted.

  “I should also note,” he continued, his voice still soft, “that your conviction for grand theft auto, while a youth conviction thanks to your parents’ influence, has still resulted in your admission to the Tau Ceti Jump Mage Academy being revoked.

  “You walk out of here in three days,” he concluded, “but you have nowhere to go but home.”

  “So, what’s the fucking point of this, then?” she demanded. “A Mage by Right here to gloat over one of the lucky ones born to it fucking it all up? What do you want, Montgomery?”

  Damien hadn’t actually given her his name, though he was hardly surprised that she knew who he was. The Hands of the Mage-King of Mars were his roving warrior-judges who spoke with his voice and held what the Romans had once called imperium—the right to command the Protectorate military.

  There were also only fourteen of them right now. Small and inoffensive as Damien was, people tended not to associate him with the public images of Lord Hand Damien Montgomery, but Chambers knew his office and could draw the connection.

  She was a smart kid. Which was, of course, why Damien was there.

  “I’m wondering how someone with so much going for them fucked up so badly,” he responded bluntly, throwing her profanity back in her face. “Though I’ll note that I see a different pattern then the Navy recruiters did when you took the intake exam.”