Hand of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 2) Read online

  Hand of Mars

  By Glynn Stewart

  Copyright 2015

  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.

  If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  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.

  Chapter 1

  Mars shrank in the window as the starship got under way. Unlike most apparent ‘windows’ aboard the vessel, this one actually looked out onto space, an observatory tucked away on one corner of the immense white pyramid.

  If Damien Montgomery stepped right up to the glass and turned his head just right, he could see the star-white plume of reaction mass blazing out from the battleship’s matter-antimatter engines. He couldn’t feel the acceleration as the magic woven into the runes under his feet provided an artificial gravity that countered the force of the ship’s thrust.

  His gaze was focused on Mars. The massive peak of Olympus Mons, visible from low orbit, had just rotated over the horizon. Over the last three years, the mountain capital of the Mage-King of Mars’ Protectorate had become home.

  He hadn’t left Olympus Mons since arriving on the terraformed world. He’d arrived not quite a prisoner, having demonstrated a rare gift with magic and an even rarer gift for causing trouble.

  Now, after three years of being the Mage-King’s direct student – when and if Desmond Alexander had time around his duties and responsibilities – he was leaving again.

  “My Lord Envoy?” a voice said from behind him.

  Damien turned around to find himself facing a young man in a navy blue uniform with narrow gold cuffs. If memory was correct, the single narrow cuff marked the man as a Lieutenant. The man didn’t wear the same gold medallion at his neck as Damien, so he was not a Mage – ‘just’ one of the many mundane officers that kept the Navy running.

  “Yes, Lieutenant…?”

  “Lieutenant Keller, My Lord,” the young man replied, and a slight shiver ran down Damien’s spine. Keller was, at most, five years younger than his own not-quite-thirty. The uniform and the sidearm the man carried should have marked him as Damien’s superior in most circumstances.

  The fact that Damien was the only person on the fifty million ton battleship Righteous Guardian of Liberty not wearing a uniform said something different. The crackling parchment in the inner pocket of his perfectly tailored black suit told the rest of the story: he bore a Warrant directly from the Mage-King of Mars as His Envoy, empowered to speak on His behalf for a specific mission.

  “Mage-Captain Adamant requests your presence for dinner with the senior officers in her quarters this evening,” the Lieutenant told him quickly.

  Damien smiled, trying to put the younger man at ease. He quickly realized that, faced with a man who spoke with his King’s Voice, clad all in black with skin-tight gloves, the young Lieutenant was never going to be at ease.

  “Let Captain Adamant know I will be there,” he finally told the Lieutenant. “Thank you.”

  With a perfectly crisp salute that Damien wasn’t entirely sure even his current status required, Lieutenant Keller all-but fled the observatory.

  Damien waited until the youth had left, and rested his gloved hand on the pocket of his suit jacket. The archaic parchment of his Warrant crinkled under his fingers and he sighed.

  How had he gone from wanting to jump starships between the stars to this?

  #

  He was early for dinner, and only Mage-Captain Janet Adamant was in her dining room when he arrived. The room was easily large enough to seat all of Adamant’s officers, with a table made from an Old Earth oak tree.

  Despite living in the Sol system for three years, the table was still a luxury to Damien’s eyes: he’d been raised on the MidWorld of Sherwood, almost a month’s travel from Earth. At home, anything from Earth had been a barely affordable luxury for even the wealthy.

  “Welcome, My Lord Envoy,” Adamant greeted him. She was a tall woman, with the slightly Asian features of a Martian native.

  “Please, call me Damien,” he told her. “The ‘My Lord’s are confusing – I keep looking around for the actual important person.”

  “The third adult Rune Wright in the galaxy, personally trained in politics, magic and law by the Mage-King himself, and the man who brought down the Blue Star Syndicate,” Adamant replied calmly. “Unimportant, huh?”

  “I didn’t bring down the Syndicate,” Damien pointed out. “I killed Azure – a lot of hard work by people wearing your uniform finished the job.”

  Mikhail Azure, onetime leader of the largest crime syndicate in the Protectorate, had chased Damien to the end of the galaxy. Eventually Damien had been forced to carve a dangerous rune into his own flesh, allowing him to destroy the crime lord’s personal warship and save his own friends.

  His ‘reward’ for that had been to be drafted by the Mage-King.

  “Most people would kill for three years of training under the Mage-King,” the Captain pointed out, responding to what he hadn’t said as much as what he had.

  Damien shrugged.

  “It wasn’t a reward,” he pointed out. “As you said, I’m one of three adult Rune Wrights in the galaxy. Given that our very existence is classified enough we couldn’t have this conversation with your staff in the room, they couldn’t exactly let me roam free.”

  Adamant chuckled and shook her head at him.

  “Fair enough,” she admitted. “Have a seat. Wine? The food should be ready shortly.”

  Damien gratefully took a glass of wine and a seat, nodding gracefully as each of Adamant’s senior officers entered and was introduced. He wouldn’t be aboard the warship long, so he only peripherally registered the names and faces.

  “I can’t believe they pulled a freaking battleship to play courier for the pipsqueak,” someone muttered halfway through the soup.

  Looking up, Damien met the focused gaze of the Commander who served as the Righteous Guardian’s tactical officer, in charge of all of the many and varied weaponry she carried. The man was easily ten years his senior, but had the grace to look embarrassed when he realized he’d been overheard.

  “I’m quite grateful that the Righteous Guardian was going my way, actually,” Damien told him. “As you say, I’m not a very large package, and I suspect they’d have found me a box on a mail courier if you’d been heading a different way!”

  That got a laugh from everyone, including the tactical officer. Damien was a small man, easily the shortest person in the room and definitely the lightest. Spending three years studying magic, law, and politics had left him little time to bulk up.

  “What’s it like studying in Olympus Mons?” another officer, this one wearing the gold medallion marking him as a Mage along with his Commander’s uniform.

  “Intimidating,” Damien said dryly. “Believe me, when Desmond Michael Alexander assigns you homework, you find the time to do it!”

  “What’s bringing you to Tau Ceti, Envoy?” another officer asked, and Damien realized that he was going to be the center of attention tonight.

  “I’m joining Hand of the Mage-King Alaura Stealey for a mission,” he replied. “More tha
n that I can’t say.”

  That put enough of a damper on the questions that he could, at least, finish eating. It also helped avoid mentioning that even Damien himself wasn’t entirely sure what he was heading to Tau Ceti for.

  #

  Chapter 2

  Tau Ceti had been the second target of the colonization expeditions launched in the mid-Twenty-Third century. From the not-quite-secret history archives contained in Olympus Mons, Damien was certain the reaction of the Mages leading the first expeditions to find habitable planets in the system had been outright sighs of relief.

  The Compact, the deal between Mages and the rest of humanity that had ended the Eugenics Wars of the Twenty-Second and Twenty-Third centuries, had offered transport to the stars as the bribe for humanity accepting the Mage-King. Given that the Mages were the product of the very Eugenicists a century-long war had been fought to overthrow, the first Mage-King had needed a giant carrot.

  Tau Ceti’s two habitable worlds had been among the first part of that carrot. Their biospheres crushed by once-a-century meteor bombardments, they had nonetheless had some life and hence atmospheres capable of supporting humanity.

  Now, over two hundred years later, Tau Ceti f was a chilly, but heavily populated world. A massive space station orbited ahead of it, clearing a path through the system’s field of meteors and comets with an array of lasers that put even Righteous Guardian’s armament to shame.

  A similar station shielded Tau Ceti e, though that planet’s sheer mass had limited its habitability. The station at Tau Ceti e, however, also shielded the third largest ship-building complex in the Protectorate. Only the yards above Earth and Mars were larger, and outside the Sol system only Legatus came close.

  Holding pride of place in the center of the complex was a skeleton of girders and plates the size of the Righteous Guardian of Liberty. Eventually, that shell would become the thirteenth battleship of the Royal Martian Navy.

  For now, the Guardian would slot in beside her to undergo a refit that would bring her own systems up to the same specifications as the new vessel. As Damien had reminded the senior officers, he and the mighty warship had simply been going the same way.

  He’d spent most of the three day voyage in either his quarters or the observatory, and the final approach to the Tau Ceti Yard Complex found him in the observatory, stretching his eyes – with a few tricks even most Mages wouldn’t know – to pick out the ship he was meeting.

  “Captain Adamant,” he said quietly into a communicator. “Please have a shuttle prepared for me. I will meet it in the bay.”

  “Of course, Envoy Montgomery,” she confirmed. “What destination should I give the pilot?”

  “I’m not certain what slip number,” Damien admitted, “but the Tides of Justice is finishing up her refit about five slips up from the new battleship. I will meet Hand Stealey aboard her vessel.

  “I appreciate the ride, Captain,” he finished. “It has been far more pleasant than the last time I rode aboard a Royal Navy warship.”

  That last time had been aboard the Tides of Justice – and it had been an open question whether the rogue Rune Wright that Hand Stealey was bringing in was a guest or a prisoner.

  #

  Even the Warrant in his breast pocket was a frail shield against Damien’s nervousness as the shuttle docked with the Tides of Justice. While the piece of parchment gave him an authority that was mind-boggling to the vast majority of the human race, Alaura Stealey was a Hand.

  He held the Mage-King’s Voice for this one mission to the planet of Ardennes. Stealey held His Voice, and every other aspect of the Mage-King’s authority, permanently.

  With a final thud, the shuttle connected. “We have a solid seal,” the co-pilot announced, and the pilot turned in his seat to face Damien.

  “Good luck, My Lord,” the young officer told him.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Damien replied. “It was a smoother flight than I expected for how busy the Yards are. Well done.”

  “Traffic Control has everything pinned down to the nines,” the pilot admitted. “I can’t take the credit.”

  Damien inclined his head in acknowledgement. He’d trained as a pilot as part of his Jump Mage training, and he knew that no matter how neatly the Yards’ Traffic Control had set up their lanes and routes, that smooth a ride took skill.

  Behind him, the shuttle airlock slowly hissed open. With a final nod to the shuttle crew, Damien Montgomery grabbed the handle bar over the lock and rotated into it. Even the Navy didn’t bother with magical gravity on shuttles, and a prosaic yellow caution line marked where the swirling silver patterns of runes started.

  Beyond that line was the main shuttle bay of Alaura Stealey’s personal destroyer. Rather than risk making a fool of himself in front of his new boss, he pulled a tiny of bit of power into himself. A moment of focus, and a localized gravity field oriented his ‘down’.

  His feet settled on the steel plates out of sight of whatever welcoming committee an Envoy rated, and he calmly stepped forward across the yellow line and into the bay.

  “ATTEN-HUT!” a parade ground voice bellowed, and a double file of Royal Marines snapped to attention.

  Swallowing hard, Damien stepped out between the two ruler-straight lines of armed soldiers. At the end of the corridor they formed, he spotted Alaura Stealey waiting, flanked by two men in the uniform of the Royal Martian Navy.

  Alaura looked much the same as he remembered her, a slim gray-haired woman with ice blue eyes and a perpetually even expression. Like Damien, she was dressed in a plain black suit and wore skin-tight gloves over her hands.

  “Envoy Damien Montgomery,” she greeted him warmly. “Welcome back aboard the Tides of Justice. I don’t believe you know Mage-Lieutenant Silversmith, the Tides’ new executive officer, but I know you’ve met her Captain, Mage-Commander Harmon.”

  She gestured to the man on her left first, a dark-skinned and dark-eyed heavyset man with at least a foot on Damien, and then to the man on her right, who Damien did recognize.

  Mage-Commander Harmon, then a Mage-Lieutenant, had been Hand Stealey’s personal aide when she’d chased Damien halfway across the galaxy. For his sins, and the coincidence of being Damien’s age, the then executive officer of the Tides of Justice had spent a portion of his precious free time helping maintain Damien’s sanity.

  Like Silversmith, Harmon was taller and broader than Damien, though his new executive officer still overtopped him by several inches.

  “Mage-Commander, huh?” Damien asked as he shook the Tides’ Captain’s hand. “Congratulations!”

  “It’s recent, but thank you,” Harmon replied calmly. “Mage-Captain Barnett earned herself a shiny new cruiser, and Her Ladyship here,” he indicated Alaura with his chin, “decided she’d rather keep me than break in a new captain.”

  “I was feeling lazy and charitable that day,” Alaura allowed. She held out a hand to Damien. “May I see your Warrant, Envoy?” she asked, her voice suddenly formal.

  He swallowed hard and then removed the single piece of parchment from his suit-jacket pocket and passed it to her.

  Slowly, carefully, Alaura unfolded the archaic document and read it over. Then she handed it back to him.

  “Everything is in order, Envoy,” she concluded aloud. “It’s good to see you again, Damien. Commander Harmon – you may dismiss the honor guard.

  “We have a great deal to discuss.”

  #

  Chapter 3

  Lori Armstrong, onetime member of Ardennes’ Planetary Parliament, tightened the cinch on her body armor vest. Whoever had designed the military-grade gear that had ended up on Ardennes hadn’t really sized the armor for a woman who had freely used sex appeal to try and overturn the assumption that the opposition couldn’t win seats on Ardennes.

  She’d won her seat in the end, only to discover that Mage-Governor Michael Vaughn’s Prosperity Party had locked up the government in more ways than one. The six seats her Ardennes’ F
reedom Party had managed to sneak in had been a tiny and ignored voice in a two hundred seat legislature.

  Which was a story that ended here – with an ex-politician in body armor carrying a battle carbine strapped into the back of a stealth gunship smuggled in from offworld.

  “How long?” she asked, pitching her voice to carry over the noise of the paired tilt-rotors carrying the little aircraft on its tree-skimming course around the planet.

  “Thirty minutes, boss,” the pilot replied. “Couldn’t we have kicked the pot over somewhere closer to home?”

  Lori shook her head wordlessly at the pilot. The woman, commander of one their two priceless squadrons of Legatus-built military aircraft, knew perfectly well that this hadn’t been planned.

  She grabbed a communicator and checked the tell-tales on its encryption. Like the gunship, the high-tech encrypted communicators had been manufactured on Legatus and smuggled in via false manifests and hidden cargo drops.

  “Hotel, come in,” she said into the device after punching in one of the twenty-six or so codes it could take.

  “Please tell me you’re almost here,” the familiar voice of Anthony Hellet, codename Hotel, the head of the Karslberg Miners’ Union, another ex-member of the Freedom Party, answered. “The Scorpions have retreated to their barracks, but we’ve got no heavy weapons here, boss.”

  “We’re thirty minutes out,” she told him. “What were you thinking?” she demanded. “We’re not ready, Hotel.”

  “It was just a strike,” her old friend told her. “Shaft Six’s air circulators were down, and the mine boss was ordering people in with just respirators. The crew refused.

  “Then the Scorpions rolled in, and I couldn’t have stopped my people from interfering if I’d wanted to,” he finished bluntly.

  The Scorpions – the Ardennes Special Security Service – were technically an elite paramilitary police force. In practice, Mage-Governor Vaughn used them as his personal bullies and leg-breakers across the planet.