Voice of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 3) Read online

  Oliver had clearly chosen only his best and most dedicated to guard the hostages as three of them opened fire on them. Their bullets slammed into the barrier of solid air Damien had conjured and ricocheted away.

  The rest opened fire on Damien. Gunfire echoed in the massive chamber for a few seconds, bullets slamming into his personal shield of hardened air. Damien winced as the impacts transmitted through to him as a bone-rattling vibration, and then retaliated.

  Lightning flashed through the air, the energy directed now. The men firing on the hostages went down first, spasming as electricity blasted through their bodies. Those firing at him didn’t last much longer, and less than twenty seconds after putting a gun to the forehead of a Hand, every Neo-Puritan terrorist in the room was on the ground.

  Most would probably live. Damien dropped the shield around the hostages and checked them over with a glance. They all appeared to be physically okay, if shaken.

  “Tie them up,” he ordered the hostages, gesturing at the Neo-Puritans.

  Checking his wrist computer, he confirmed that he had remote access to the NPLF’s computer setup. With a single keystroke, he shut the whole system down.

  “Mage-Captain Jakab,” he said calmly as he opened up a link to the battlecruiser Duke of Magnificence in orbit. “The bombs have been disabled. You may deploy your Marines.”

  “Understood, my lord,” Kole Jakab responded. “Shuttles are en route, ETA ten minutes. Can you hold?”

  There was probably a manual backup for the explosives – but it would be down here with the bombs. Anyone who wanted to blow up the dam or kill the hostages now was going to have to go through Damien Montgomery.

  He smiled.

  “I can hold.”

  #

  “You are go to deploy,” Mage-Captain Jakab’s voice crackled over the speakers in the shuttle’s cockpit. “Special Agent Amiri has tactical command. Good luck.”

  “Finally,” Julia Amiri snapped. “Get us moving,” she ordered the pilot. The tall, heavily muscled, ex-bounty hunter-turned special agent was not impressed with her charge today.

  “We are breaking clear, as are the other shuttles,” the young woman in the pilot’s seat replied. She wore the insignia of a Royal Martian Navy Lieutenant and seemed unperturbed with the large, aggressive, woman in her copilot’s seat. “How do you want to handle this, Agent?”

  Technically, this was a Marine drop. The four assault shuttles carried eighty Royal Martian Marines in full exosuit battle armor. In practice, since the whole operation was taking place under the auspices of a Hand, the Secret Service Special Agent tasked with keeping said Hand alive ended up in charge.

  “According to Damien’s shuttle, there are a dozen SAM launchers along the dam,” she pointed out. “Even if he’s knocked out their computer network, those can almost certainly be operated in local control. Plus, if his idiotness manages to get himself killed before we get down there, none of us will have jobs tomorrow. What do you think?”

  “Fast and hard it is, ma’am,” the Lieutenant said cheerfully. “I suggest you hold on.”

  Julia watched with poorly concealed impatience as the four shuttle craft drifted away from their multi-megaton mothership, then was slammed back into her seat as they rotated and lit up their main engines.

  “I make it six minutes to the dam,” the pilot said into the shuttle’s PA. “We’ll be hitting the SAMs on the way down and kicking y’all out the hatch at fifty meters and three hundred kilometers an hour. Thanks for flying Royal Navy!”

  The young officer turned to Julia with a brilliant grin.

  “I suggest you go back and get into your armor, ma’am. This is not going to be a ride for the squishy.”

  #

  “What do you need us to do?”

  The speaker was probably the youngest of the dam’s staff, a young and quite attractive brunette in a prim black suit. The holographic badge on her lapel identified her as one of the handful of engineers on the night shift.

  Damien smiled at her, hopefully reassuringly. Most of the hostages were still looking panicked and unsure, and he was keeping his eyes on the elevator. There was only so much he could do at this point.

  “I need you all to get behind cover,” he told her, pitching his voice loudly enough so that they could all hear him. “The turbines should do – I’ve jammed their ability to remote detonate the bombs, so they have to come down here to set them all off.”

  “That would kill…” the engineer trailed off, then nodded firmly. He could see the realization of what the Neo-Puritan Liberation Front meant to do finally fully sinking in. The threat to her had probably been so immediate she hadn’t followed through the purpose of the bombs across the turbine chamber.

  She turned away from Damien and started chivvying her coworkers into cover. The older, more senior, or just more aware among them joined in. By the time the elevator reported its return, both the former hostages and their ex-guards had been tucked away out of sight.

  When the elevator doors opened again, the only person in the path of the fusillade of bullets the terrorists unleashed was Damien. Oliver had apparently taken the time to set up a pair of heavy machine guns in the elevator before sending it back down, and the deadly weapons unleashed a hail of death.

  The heavy slugs slammed into Damien’s barrier of solidified air, the impacts managing to drive him back a step and make the runes wrapped around his arms and torso heat up with the energy he was exerting.

  Hoping to short-stop the attack before it became dangerous even to him, he threw a fireball back into the elevator. The bolt of energy froze and shattered before reaching the terrorists, and Damien realized he was facing another Mage.

  He slammed his barrier forward, blocking the entrance to the elevator completely just as the other heavy weapons the NPLF had brought down fired. The heavy armor piercing rockets slammed into the wall of solidified air with ground-shaking force.

  Unprepared for that level of force, Damien’s barrier failed to stop the rockets’ shaped charges from penetrating the shield. Jets of fire and molten metal blasted a dozen feet past his barrier towards him, and the heat sent him reeling backwards.

  None of the jets reached him, and the back-blast from their impacts turned the interior of the elevator into the depths of hell. The sound of machine gun ammunition cooking off was almost an afterthought, the heavy bullets shredding anyone still left standing.

  Even as the fireball was fading, John Oliver walked out. The Neo-Puritan leader was wrapped in a shield of magically chilled air, deflecting away the heat of his people’s destruction, and his face was twisted in wrath.

  Oliver raised his hands, and Damien easily identified the ‘projector’ rune of a trained Combat Mage on the other man’s palm. That was a piece of intelligence no one had managed to pass on to him before he’d agreed to meet the man.

  “I am the Elect of God,” the terrorist thundered. “I will not be denied.” He raised his hand and lightning hammered out from the rune, energy flashing across the void of the turbine chamber with vicious power.

  Damien had the same projector rune carved into his left palm, matching the interface rune used for Jumping starships on his right palm. Unlike the other man, he also had Runes of Power carved into his forearms, shoulders, and upper back. Each Rune doubled the power of a Mage who, other than his ability to read the flow of power well enough to create them, had been of mediocre power at best.

  With five, Damien had no equals but the Mage-King himself. He knocked Oliver’s lightning bolt aside, carefully directing it away from the explosives scattered around the room, and followed up with lightning of his own.

  The force of the Hand’s strike drove Oliver to his knees, his defense barely holding against the impact.

  “Surrender,” Damien told him. “It’s over – you’ve already lost.”

  Even as he spoke, he heard a thumping impact above him that was almost certainly his inbound assault shuttles taking out the SAM launchers. />
  “I. Am. The. Elect. Of. GOD!” Oliver repeated in a bellow, somehow rising to his feet again. He charged Damien, fire flaring from his hands as he tried to reach the Hand.

  He made it halfway before Damien met him with a blade of pure force that sliced through his defenses as if they weren’t even there – and cut the terrorist leader in half.

  #

  Julia left the shuttle in the middle of the pack, flanked by a pair of Marines who had been told in no uncertain terms by their platoon leader that the Special Agent was coming back intact.

  She didn’t have the heart to tell the adorable pup of a Lieutenant that she had more hours in the two-meter-tall exosuits than any three of his Marines combined. The two ‘bodyguards’, at least, had at least got the hint when she’d slotted into the massive battle armor and booted up in under thirty seconds.

  They flanked her on her way out of the shuttle, but made no attempt to guide her down. The chute mounted in the back of the suit blasted out as soon as they were clear of the shuttle – there was no time in a high speed, low altitude drop like this.

  The chute had only moments to slow her descent, aided by one-shot rockets strapped to the suit’s legs and arms. She was still going over a hundred kilometers an hour when she hit the ground, an impact even the exosuit’s powerful shock absorbers couldn’t make gentle.

  “Hoorah!” one of the Marines with her exclaimed. “Can we do that again?”

  That left Julia smiling, even as the bullets started to fly in their direction. The SAM launchers were smoldering wrecks, but it looked like the NPLF still had people on top of the dam.

  The entire twenty man platoon that had dropped from her shuttle, however, followed her as she identified a blinking icon on her display and charged towards it. With eighty Marines dropped onto the dam, she could leave the terrorists on the top of the concrete cliff to the other three exosuit platoons.

  She followed the icon showing her Montgomery’s location to the central buttressing tower. The door might technically have been a secured entrance, but it failed to even slow the battle armored Marines down.

  “Elevator is at the bottom and stuck,” the point man reported over the platoon link. “No response to regular or override commands.”

  “Out of the way,” Julia ordered brusquely. She brushed past the soldier, ripped the elevator door off its hinges, and stepped off into the shaft.

  With neither a chute nor the one-shot rockets to slow her, it was a short trip. She crashed into the burnt out wreckage of the elevator car moments later, wincing as the suit’s shock absorbers took most of the impact.

  A loud crashing noise heralded the arrival of her two personal Marine puppies, followed shortly by a small groan.

  “I take it back,” the previous speaking Marine whispered on the radio. “Let’s not do that again.”

  Smirking, Julia smashed her way through the debris and into the main turbine chamber. The humming sound of the turbines filled the air as she scanned the open void, her rifle sweeping for potential targets.

  Scorch marks splayed out from the wrecked elevator door, ending just short of a ripped apart body. The only living person visible was Damien Montgomery. The Hand looked… exhausted.

  “Am I late?” she asked dryly.

  “No,” he replied quietly. “Just later than Mister Oliver.” He gestured to the body. “I think we’re done here, Agent Amiri. We’ll need pickup for the hostages.”

  “You saved them all?” Julia knew the hostages were why the Hand had gone in first. She still hadn’t quite expected him to succeed.

  “Everyone who was still alive,” Montgomery confirmed. “If we can get a Marine demo team in here as well, I’m sure a lot of people will be happier once these explosives are disarmed.”

  Chapter 3

  Duke of Magnificence was a twelve million ton Honorific-class battlecruiser, one of the most powerful warships constructed by the Royal Martian Navy. An immense stark-white pyramid driven by antimatter engines and containing the most advanced technology known to man, she would still have been bound to the star system of her construction without the silver runes carved throughout her hull and linking to a tiny simulacrum of the ship at her heart.

  With that rune matrix, a Jump Mage like Damien Montgomery himself could teleport the vessel vast distances in a moment. With the jump matrix and the Protectorate’s carefully maintained caste of Mages, the Mage-King of Mars held together a loose collection of almost a hundred star systems.

  When the mighty warship had been assigned to Damien as his personal transport, he’d argued. Most of the Hands had made do with destroyers or even personal yachts for years. Desmond Michael Alexander, Mage-King of Mars, was, however, as implacable as a falling mountain when his mind was set.

  So a day after rescuing the hostages on the surface of Panterra found Damien, in a brand new suit, in his ‘office’ – the smallest of the Duke’s observation decks – staring out the window at the blue and green planet below.

  “I have the document you requested, Lord Montgomery,” a voice announced behind him.

  Damien smiled.

  “‘Hello, Damien.’ ‘How are you, Doctor Christoffsen?’ ‘I’m fine, Damien, how are you?’” he mock-quoted back at his political aide, a man almost twice his age who wouldn’t have looked out of place in tweed. “Does any of this sound familiar, Robert?” he asked.

  “I reserve the niceties for when I think we have time for them, my lord,” Doctor Robert Christoffsen, holder of three Ph. Ds that Damien was aware of and former elected Governor of the Tara system, replied. “Governor Rose’s shuttle is on her way. If you have any changes you wish made to this, we have limited time.”

  Damien turned away from the view through the magically transparent steel window and gestured for his aide to hand him the parchment.

  “I never get tired of seeing worlds like this,” he murmured to Christoffsen as he skimmed the parchment. “It helps remind me what it’s all about.”

  “Sixty-three million souls,” the ex-Governor replied. “At last census, five point eight million of them are either Neo-Puritan by religion or descended from Neo-Puritan colonists.”

  “How close is your report to being ready?”

  “I’m only synthesizing what our observers already reported,” Christoffsen told him. “The key points are there,” he pointed to the parchment, “but the full report will be ready by tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, Robert,” Damien said quietly. “I’m not sure I could do this part of the job without you.”

  “His Majesty taught you well,” his aide told him. “While I would hardly diminish my contributions, I suspect you’d do fine. Ardennes is shaping up well, after all.”

  The younger man winced. Ardennes had been his first mission for the Mage-King, almost six months ago now. He’d ended up overthrowing a hopelessly corrupt local government and imposing temporary direct Martian rule. The last he’d heard, things were progressing well and the interim Governor was expecting to hold elections for the new parliament a full year ahead of schedule.

  “I can’t take all the credit for that,” he pointed out. “I was there less than three weeks, after all.”

  “You gave them a foundation,” Christoffsen replied. “That’s all we need to do here. Do you have any changes to the proclamation, my lord?”

  The Hand finished skimming the document, then folded it up. Crossing to the desk tucked against one side of the observation window, he removed an archaic-looking physical seal and pressed it down on the fold. The seal automatically applied its own wax, closing the document and then stamping the image of a single closed fist on the seal.

  “No,” Damien answered, looking down at the formal parchment. “Governor Rose’s shuttle is here,” he noted, gesturing out the window at the bright light of the decelerating spacecraft.

  “Are you planning on meeting her, or are we playing games today?” Christoffsen asked.

  “She’s happy with me now, and she’ll be angr
y with me later,” the Hand replied with a smile. “Let’s soften her up some more. We’ll meet her in the landing bay.”

  #

  Mage-Captain Jakab’s people had done Damien proud. By the time Governor Rose exited her shuttle, a double file of Marines had formed a ruler-straight honor guard leading her towards the Mage-Captain and Damien himself.

  The Governor was a short, somewhat dumpy woman, with silvering blond hair and a seemingly perpetual smile on her face. A trio of men in plain suits so identical as to be a uniform followed, each of them with a shoulder-mounted camera tracking every aspect of the scene.

  Jakab stepped forward as the Governor approached and bowed slightly. The tall and pale officer’s gaze flicked to the cameras before focusing on the leader of the planet beneath them.

  “Governor Rose, welcome aboard the Duke of Magnificence,” he greeted her warmly. “We are honored to have you aboard.”

  As his ship’s captain was speaking, Damien noted the trio following the Governor and sighed. The Hand had yet to meet a camera whose footage didn’t make him look far younger than his actual age. Nonetheless, as the cameras rotated to focus on him, he pasted a smile on his face and stepped forward to meet the Governor.

  “Hand Montgomery,” she greeted him brightly. “Allow me to offer the thanks of my entire world for your timely intervention! Without your actions…” she shuddered. “Oliver was insane.”

  “Insanity would be an excuse, madam Governor,” Damien replied. “His actions were evil, and he paid the price for them. Mars would provide a poor Protectorate if we failed to protect, wouldn’t we?”

  “Of course, my lord,” she agreed instantly. “Nonetheless, thousands rest in safety today thanks to you.”

  Damien bowed his head, accepting the praise carefully.

  “We have matters to discuss, Governor,” he said softly. Glancing at the cameras, he added: “In private.”