Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5) Read online

  The five Runes of Power followed. Each was a thaumic feedback loop that dramatically amplified his own magical power. If those runes had problems, he’d probably already know—because he’d be dead. There was a lot of power wrapped up in them, and if he was lucky, a failure would only kill him. If he was unlucky, it could take out a city block at least.

  The projector rune at the top of his right palm was almost an afterthought, the rune designed to extend a Combat Mage’s range, almost overkill on top of the Runes of Power. It was still useful, though, enough that he’d added it after his first two Runes of Power.

  A tiny trickle of power ran through them, confirming everything was still working, while Damien doffed his suit jacket and dress shirt for an armored vest and black T-shirt. He’d destroyed a few too many suits over the years to knowingly wear one into combat again.

  “Touchdown in sixty seconds,” the pilot reported. “Linked into the traffic control system; the street should be clear for us.”

  “Ready?”

  “Oohrah!”

  #

  The shuttle dropped toward the suburban street at high speed, crashing to a halt in a flare of rockets barely two meters from the ground. It started to descend the last distance, but the rear door was already open and Romanov led his first team out.

  Damien was barely a step behind the first four armed men, magic flaring around him as he controlled his descent to land safely. Romanov did the same…but the three Marines following him had no such gifts.

  They hit the ground and rolled with the ease of long practice, the impact-absorbing motion also allowing them to be well out in front of their commander and their principal. Damien’s bodyguards, he noted with a mental smile, knew him very well.

  “Clear!” one of the Marines announced loudly as the three of them swept the street with the barrels of their guns.

  “Move in,” Romanov ordered, sensibly gesturing his subordinates ahead of him while he dropped back to stand beside Damien.

  The Hand was studying the display on his wrist computer, reviewing the sensor data from the shuttle.

  “The entire house is shielded,” he told the Special Agent softly. “We’re not getting any clean readings.”

  “That’s why we have doorknockers,” Romanov replied. “Conner, Chan, secure the door! Carefully.”

  With the shuttle landed, the rest of Damien’s bodyguards slash strike team were spreading out around them, watching the street.

  The designated Marines moved up to flank the door, rifles at the ready as one of them reached over and gently tried the handle. Conner was already patting his pockets for explosives, but the door swung open at Chau’s touch.

  “That’s…unexpected,” Romanov murmured. “Move in by fire teams,” he snapped aloud. “Watch your backs. I don’t like this.”

  With the Marine Mage-Captain turned Special Agent standing beside him, Damien was effectively restrained from barging in first or even right behind the lead team. Romanov, however, wasn’t significantly more patient than the Hand, and followed the second team into the building.

  The two Mages arguably each represented more firepower than the rest of the twenty-man detail, but they were no less vulnerable to traps than the Marines and Secret Service Agents.

  Eight men and women, half Marines and half Agents, went ahead of them. The entryway and outer portion of the house looked surprisingly normal, though Damien noted that there seemed to be a central core everything was arranged around…and that core didn’t have any doors.

  “Nothing out here has been touched,” one of the Agents noted. “It’s a decoy.”

  There were no stairs, either. The inner section of the house, easily fifteen meters across, was completely cut off from the outside, and any access to the second floor or basement was inside the sealed section.

  “Find the access,” Romanov ordered. “There has to be one.”

  The detail spread out, searching the decoy “house” for the entrance to the safehouse itself.

  “Here!”

  Damien and Romanov followed the shout into the decoy kitchen, where one of the Marines had managed to swing the entire fridge out of place.

  “It’s on some kind of hinge,” she reported. “If it locks… Well, it wasn’t locked.”

  “That’s consistent, at least,” Damien said. “Romanov?”

  “If you’ll stand back, my lord,” the Marine Special Agent replied, then gestured the fire team in the kitchen forward.

  Leading the way with their rifle barrels, they pushed the appliance fully out of the way and moved into the dimly lit space beyond. Lights and scanners reached into the darkness, and Damien waited impatiently for their report.

  “Six-meter-long corridor, terminating in a metal security hatch. We’ve got laser emitters, disabled ones. They’re linked up to a row of claymores, but…everything’s shut down.”

  “Disconnect them anyway,” Romanov ordered. “No chances.”

  “On it. Hold on.”

  Damien tried not to hold his breath as the troopers worked, preparing a shield of hardened air to drop between the Marines and the mines at a moment’s notice.

  It went unneeded as they did their work slowly and competently.

  “We’re clear. Advancing on the hatch. No movement on the scopes.”

  The Hand wanted to charge in right behind them, but he was starting to learn better. Instead, he watched down the hall as the four-man fire team reached the heavy steel door and prepared to breach.

  And again, the door was unlocked.

  “Hatch is open. Scopes have pressure scanners linked to unknown defenses… They were already disabled.”

  “This is creepy,” Romanov told Damien.

  “And dangerous,” he replied. “We’re moving in.”

  “My lord—”

  “We’re either already too late or we’re running out of time,” Damien snapped. “With me, Mage-Captain.”

  #

  The fire teams fell into place around them as Damien pushed forward through the security hatch, conjuring a mobile shield of hardened air to protect them all from any active traps.

  He wasn’t particularly surprised, however, when nothing impeded their progress. The disabled alarms, the disarmed traps, it all added up to a very clear picture—and not one he liked.

  Once they were past the decoys and the security, the main floor of the safehouse was a drab little apartment with no natural light. A cheap kitchenette, a cheaper set of chairs and a table, and stairs leading up and down.

  “Up or down, Captain?” Damien asked.

  “If I was living in this place, I’d be up,” Romanov replied. “Where there’s actual light.”

  Damien nodded and climbed the stairs, his shield sweeping ahead of him.

  Even through the barrier of solidified air, though, the smell of smoke and blood began to reach him, and the Hand suspected what he was going to find. The door at the top of the stairs swung open at the gentlest touch of his magic, and he stepped through into what had been a library.

  Someone had stripped the shelves, dumping the books and papers into the middle of the room, and then set it all on fire. The still-smoldering pile of debris also included data disks and sticks, all cracked and ruined now.

  While the papers and data disks might have contained answers, Damien’s main hope for them had been Dr. Periklis Raptis, PhD in Runic Studies. Unfortunately, that worthy lay on the ground just past the impromptu fire pit, his eyes staring blankly into the wall.

  “Get me containment on that fire,” Damien snapped as he stepped around it to reach Raptis. Kneeling, he closed the swarthy old man’s eyes, studying the body and the room.

  The Keeper had been shot four times at point-blank range, all from behind.

  “He would have died quickly,” Romanov said as he joined the Hand. “One of those rounds severed his spine.”

  “We needed him alive,” Damien replied. “Someone else…didn’t. Someone he knew.”

  “You
’re guessing that because the defenses are down?” Romanov asked.

  “That’s one factor, yes. Also, the Professor was a Mage,” the Hand told him. “He was a Mage, someone killed him, and the room is still mostly intact. He didn’t think he was being threatened, didn’t fight back.”

  “That’s…not a good sign, boss.”

  “A Keeper shot Charlotte,” Damien reminded his bodyguard. “Everyone may want to blame me for her death, and I’m certainly responsible, but she was shot by one of her own.”

  “Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark,” Romanov said slowly.

  “Agreed. We need MIS Forensics. This mess is outside our expertise now.”

  #

  Chapter 3

  Damien was back outside by the time the MIS Forensics team arrived on helicopters sweeping in from the local office. The Curiosity City police had been on their way before his shuttle had even touched down, and their blue-and-white cars now blocked both ends of the street, allowing the MIS choppers to land without impediment.

  The Lieutenant leading the police detachment saluted Damien as soon as he saw the golden hand hanging on the smaller man’s chest.

  “My lord,” the uniformed officer said swiftly. “I’ve got twenty men and women holding the street clear. What are your orders?”

  “Unfortunately, it looks like everyone in the house is dead,” Damien told the cop. “You can close your perimeter up to keep this house clear, but this has turned from a raid into a crime scene.”

  The cop winced.

  “That’s…only our fifth murder this year, my lord Hand,” he admitted. “We’re a university town; it’s generally pretty quiet here except the drunk and disorderlies.”

  “I know,” the Hand replied. The most excitement Curiosity City had seen in recent months had been when he’d raided the university to try and arrest Raptis the first time. He nodded toward the choppers, where men and women in black fatigues with yellow lettering were off-loading equipment.

  “MIS will be handling the investigation,” he told the Lieutenant. “We’ll need you to keep the house secured, but you can probably starting letting the neighbors back in.”

  “Of course, my lord.”

  An older woman with graying hair and the mixed ethnic features of a Martian native crossed the street to Damien, looking at him with unreadable dark eyes.

  “Director Wong,” he greeted the head of the Martian Investigation Service in Curiosity City. “Good to see you again.”

  “Someday you’ll show up in my city for a social occasion, my lord, and then it will be good to see you,” she replied sharply. “What have we got?”

  “Raptis was exactly where you said he would be, Director,” Damien told her. “Unfortunately, someone beat us to him and shot him. They also burned all of the books and wrecked any data storage in the safehouse.”

  She pursed her lips.

  “Not as helpful as we hoped.”

  “No, but I’m hoping your people can get something out of it,” he concluded. “Some of the data disks or chips might have retrievable information. Also, I want your people to tear the defenses apart. They were shut down here, and if we know how, we can deal with similar defenses elsewhere.”

  “You think there are more safehouses?”

  “If I’d been running the Keepers, my plan for the Archive going up would involve a lot of overlapping partial backups,” Damien said thoughtfully. “If we keep looking, hopefully we’ll find at least one before whoever is killing the Keepers gets there.”

  “The life of a Hand is never boring, is it, my lord?”

  Before Damien could reply, the pilot stepped out of the shuttle.

  “Hand Montgomery, I have Dr. Christoffsen on the secure comms for you,” he told him.

  Damien shook his head and met Wong’s eyes with a small smile.

  “Apparently, even less boring than I might think.”

  #

  The assault shuttle had a small compartment next to the cockpit designed for the platoon officer to communicate with higher command. It had most of the equipment necessary to run a mid-sized combat action, as it wasn’t as though the company or battalion commander would have a different type of shuttle.

  Closing the door behind him, Damien brought up the secure communications suite and linked into the channel the pilot had set up for him.

  “Professor,” he greeted Dr. Robert Christoffsen, his political advisor.

  Christoffsen was a pudgy older man in the late stages of going completely bald, but he also held multiple PhDs and had spent ten years as the Governor of the Core World of Tara. As far as Damien was concerned, “the Professor” was his local definition of “wiser minds.”

  “What’s going on?” he asked. “I’m guessing it’s urgent.”

  “It couldn’t wait for this evening, no,” Christoffsen said. “We’ve been formally notified that you are being summoned before the Council of the Protectorate to be questioned about the deaths of Hands Ndosi and Octavian.”

  Damien exhaled and nodded.

  “Not unexpected,” he admitted. “Not that I’m looking forward to it. When do they want me?”

  “Oh eight hundred Olympus Mons Time tomorrow,” his aide told him. “They’ve only given us sixteen hours’ notice.”

  “To get to Ceres?” Damien considered. “We’ll need a fast ship, but we can do it. I’ll arrange for one from the Civil Fleet for us.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Christoffsen replied. “You need to get to Olympus Mons. His Majesty wants to talk to you, Damien. ASAP.”

  Damien sighed again.

  “Fortunately, I appear to have a high-speed assault shuttle to hand,” he told Christoffsen. “I’m not needed here anymore. This is a job for the crime scene people now.”

  “His Majesty’s schedule isn’t exactly wide open,” the older man told him, “but his secretary said they’d open a spot for you when you made it.”

  “That is never a good sign,” Damien said. “I’m on my way.”

  #

  Two red-armored Royal Guardsmen were waiting for Damien as he exited his shuttle. He’d changed on the way over, back into the black suit and white shirt that was the closest thing Hands had to a uniform, along with the golden icon of his office, and left most of his own guards behind on the shuttle.

  Romanov came with him and would coordinate with the Royal Guard and Secret Service in the Mountain to make sure of Damien’s safety. That they were being met by Guardsmen in power armor was disconcerting, though.

  “Guardsmen,” he greeted them. “Do you know if His Majesty has cleared time for me?”

  “He has,” a familiar voice replied from one of the suits, and Damien relaxed slightly. He’d worked with Guardsman Han in the aftermath of the Keeper debacle. “If you and the Special Agent will come with us?”

  “Of course, Guardsman Han,” Damien told her, falling in behind the armored Mage. Every Royal Guard was a fully trained Combat Mage, clad in exosuit combat armor that included runes designed by the first Mage-King to make them more powerful.

  Damien was a Rune Wright like the Mage-Kings and could sense the power of the runes woven through the two Guards’ armor. There were more effective small-scale amplifiers, like the Runes of Power inlaid in his own skin, but those Runes had to be tailored to the user by a Rune Wright.

  Outside of the Runes of Power, a Royal Guard’s armor was probably the best amplifier in existence smaller than a starship. Their existence, like that of the Rune Wrights who’d designed them, was classified.

  As they traveled through the stone corridors of Olympus Mons, Damien noted more runes appearing on the walls around them, runes that were focusing and channeling power toward a specific location. Despite his own skills and experience, they were still over halfway to the Throne Room before he realized where they were going, and he swallowed hard as they reached the massive metal doors that led to the Mage-King’s sanctum.

  “He wanted to speak to Hand Montgomery alone,�
�� Han told Romanov. “We all wait here.”

  Damien doubted that Romanov was happy about that, but there was nowhere else in the galaxy as safe as this room.

  “I’ll be fine, Denis. Wait here with Han,” he ordered.

  Taking his bodyguard’s silence as assent, Damien pushed open the double doors and stepped through to meet his King.

  #

  Damien had entered the throne room at the heart of Olympus Mons more times than he could count, even if the path down from the shuttle pad wasn’t as familiar to him as it might have been, but he could count on his fingers the number of times he’d seen the simulacrum in that chamber fully active.

  The pyramid-shaped cavern glittered with both electric and magical light as a million pieces of semi-liquid silver sand filled the air, taking the shape of planets, asteroids, ships… Everything in the Sol system was represented somewhere in the room, though there was little smaller than a planet that was more than a few specks of silver.

  Olympus Mons was an immense amplifier of incredible power, built by the Eugenicists, who had bred magic back into humanity to allow them to identify even the tiniest scrap of the Gift. They’d misunderstood what they had built, and the first Mage-King had turned it on them.

  A simple chair sat in the middle of the room, carved from the stone of the mountain and covered in runes. Once, it had been where the subjects of the Olympus Project had been tested. Now it was the true Throne of the Mage-King.

  Desmond Michael Alexander the Third sat in that chair, studying the silver orbiting his head. He was a tall, gaunt man whose hair mirrored the simulacrum above his head.

  “You know,” he said softly, “people would look at this and think I was omniscient inside Sol.”

  “A starship is three specks of sand on this scale,” Damien told him, ducking under Jupiter as he approached his King. “What’s a person?”