Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars Read online

  “When the dust settled, an entire company of the thugs were dead, and Karlsberg was rising,” Anthony finished. “Between our boys and the locals, they probably lost two more companies before they realized they’d lost the city,” he said with a cold satisfaction. “But that’s still two companies - four hundred Scorpions - in the barracks. We’re trying to hack their heavy weapon auth codes, but no luck so far.”

  Lori nodded slowly. Scorpion small arms were much the same as the imported gear many of her own people used - to the point where the cartridges were identical Protectorate-standard rounds. Scorpion heavy arms, however, were locked down with authorization codes and ident-locks to prevent them falling into the hands of people who might use them to take out armored personnel carriers and reinforced barracks.

  “Keep them pinned down,” she ordered. “A few rockets from the gunships should clear them out.”

  “Then Karlsberg will be free,” Anthony promised. “Let Vaughn suck on that.”

  A light started blinking on her comm.

  “Hold on Hotel,” Lori told him, then switched. “Alpha,” she answered the channel. Many of her people knew exactly who she was, but she still insisted on solid com discipline.

  “Boss, you have a problem,” the voice of one of her cell leaders told her. “It took a few hours to make it up the chain, but the Scorps have called in the Army.”

  Lori’s heart skipped a beat, and she glanced around the gunship. Each of the six vessels was carrying five soldiers - thirty fully equipped light infantry. Combined with the gunships’ weapons and Anthony’s rebel miners that would be enough to take down the shattered remnants of a Scorpion security battalion.

  “How many?” she asked.

  “Looks like General Keller has managed to get the entire Ninth Armored rolling,” her agent said grimly. “That’s almost sixty tanks, boss. No idea how many infantry. They’re already out of the Montagne Noir base and heading your way through the pass.”

  Lori pulled up a map on the computer on her wrist and considered it. Montagne Noir was on the other side of the Rocher d’Or mountain range from Karlsberg. They wouldn’t get there as fast as her gunships, but they’d roll over anything she could put into Karlsberg.

  That said, there was only one route through the Rocher d’Or that would fit a tank battalion - and Governor Vaughn didn’t know about their imports.

  “We’ll deal with it, Iota,” she told her cell leader. “Well done.”

  She flipped back to Anthony’s channel.

  “We’re going to be delayed,” she told him. “See if you can take out that barracks yourself - we’re going to have to deal with the Army.”

  Anthony was silent for a long moment.

  “Good luck, boss,” he said finally. “We’re both going to need it!”

  Shutting down the channel, Lori leaned forward next to the pilot.

  “You heard,” she said plainly. She could have shunted the communicator into her helmet for privacy, but she trusted everyone on the gunship with her life.

  “There’s only one pass,” she replied. “Re-routing the squadron now.”

  “Can you take them?” Lori asked, as quietly as she could with the rotors running around them.

  The woman looked back at the nominal leader of the resistance and grinned.

  “They’ll never even see us coming.”

  #

  By the time they were half a kilometer into the pass through the Rocher d’Or mountains, Lori was convinced her pilot - also her squadron commander - was insane.

  Like the gunships themselves, Alissa Leclair was an import from the Legatus system. Unlike the gunships, she’d voluntarily emigrated from the Core World regarded as the first UnArcana World, looking for work.

  Unsafe flying conditions and one accident too many had driven the helicopter pilot into the arms of Lori’s resistance.

  Fortunately, Leclair had been trained as an emergency services pilot. She was capable of flying a nape-of-the-earth course that, combined with the stealth coating and ECM of the gunships, made them invisible to orbital platforms.

  Those courses were utterly terrifying to her unfortunate passengers.

  The pass through the mountains rapidly shrank to a river valley less than four hundred meters wide, with a wide road blasted into the cliffs along one side. Leclair led her six gunships screaming down the road - with ten meters of clearance from the cliffs - at two hundred kilometers per hour.

  “There we go,” the Legatan said with a cold flatness to her voice. “Sensors show them ten kay ahead. All pilots - arm weapons systems.”

  “They’ve got to know we’re coming,” Lori said aloud. “If we can see them, they can see us.”

  “Stealth is relative, boss,” Leclair replied. “We’re stealthy as gunships go, but…” she shrugged. “You’re right. We won’t be able to do this again - but since they have no clue these babies are on the planet, we can do it this time.” The pilot patted the cockpit next to her affectionately.

  “Sensors are showing Manticore Deuces,” another pilot reported. “Those are going to be a handful.”

  “Could be worse,” Leclair told her crews. “I’m reading M2 tanks and Basilisk transports. No flak, no rockets, only onboard anti-air. Arm your cluster bombs and rockets, then follow my lead.”

  It turned out Lori had only thought Leclair’s previous flying was terrifying. The moment she ordered the other gunships to follow her lead, the Legatan pilot took the stealth gunship into a sharp dive and blasted along the middle of the mountain highway.

  Lori swallowed, hanging on to her shoulder straps with whitening fingers, and then stopped breathing outright as the aircraft tore around a corner, less than a meter from the rock face, into the face of the Ardennes Army Ninth Armored Battalion.

  “Mine,” Leclair snarled and pulled the triggers on her joystick.

  Four smart rockets blasted away from the gunship, each seeking its own target. Lori watched them with her breath held, and all of them slammed into their targets. The entire front platoon of the armored column erupted into flames, and Lori realized, at last, that they could actually do this.

  While she was overcoming her crisis of confidence, Leclair had been continuing on her lethal way. The nose-mounted auto-cannon chewed its way through a trio of APCs, leaving behind piles of burning wreckage.

  Finally, in a maneuver that almost made Lori lose her lunch, Leclair stopped the gunship in midair and blasted it a hundred meters straight up. From there, she fired two sets of heavy cluster munitions, and then twisted the gunship over the cliff face as the first, belated, return fire tried to chase her.

  Behind her, the other five gunships of her squadron began firing their own rockets.

  The armored column had never stood a chance.

  #

  Mage-Commodore Adrianna Cor, commander of the Royal Martian Navy’s Seventh Cruiser Squadron, was not a patient woman. She tolerated fools poorly and incompetents not at all.

  She had no choice but to tolerate the man on her viewscreen, however, regardless of her opinion of Mage-Governor Michael Vaughn. He was the elected leader of the planet beneath her - and if his theoretically legitimate authority wasn’t enough, he also had evidence that would put Mage-Commodore Cor in jail for a long time - and he also had a lot of money.

  “I thought your soldiers were supposed to be well-trained and well-equipped,” she said dryly. “Now, you’re telling me they got their heads handed to them by miners?”

  “In the end,” Vaughn allowed. He was a bulky blond man, with muscles only beginning to fade into fat now after twenty years as a politician. “But it started when a company was ambushed by terrorists - terrorists with very clearly offworld training and weapons. The type the Protectorate is supposed to stop filtering through to my planet.”

  Cor raised an eyebrow at the Governor. Customs and import control, as he very well knew, were the responsibility of local authorities - in this case, the fifteen Tau Ceti-built ‘export’ destroy
ers of the Ardennes System Defense Force.

  “If the town is in open rebellion, as you say,” she told him, “then roll in your Army and be done with them. A few dozen rebels, however well trained or well equipped, can’t stand off a battalion or two of tanks. Even if the entire town has gone over, which I doubt.”

  Instead of answering, Vaughn switched the camera to show an orbital shot from one of Ardennes’ many surveillance satellites. She noted absently that the resolution on the gear was fantastic even as she unconsciously leaned closer to the screen. The screen showed the wreckage of some kind of convoy - dozens of vehicles strewn across a mountain road in pieces. Sections of the road itself were on fire, and the survivors were focusing on saving people, not materiel.

  “This was my Ninth Armored Battalion,” Vaughn said bluntly. “I don’t know where the fuckers got them, but they have attack aircraft of some kind - attack aircraft that my surveillance satellites do not pick up.”

  Cor sighed.

  “What do you need, Michael?”

  “I need you to suppress the rebellion, Mage-Commodore,” he said bluntly. “Bring down fire on Karlsberg, and end this infection before it can spread.”

  She glanced at a set of tell-tales, making sure that the conversation wasn’t being recorded. So far as her flagship’s computers were concerned, she wasn’t in communication with anyone.

  “That’s one hell of a line you want me to cross,” Cor told him. “There’s what, fifty thousand people in Karlsberg?”

  Even she felt a twinge of conscience over that, and she had no sympathy for mundane drones that didn’t know their place.

  “Fifty thousand rebels,” Vaughn spat. “And if they have air support, I don’t know if we’ll be able to take the town back before the Hand arrives. Do you want to be the one explaining to one of Alexander’s ivory tower judges the realities of maintaining an economic boom in times like these?”

  Cor snorted. What Mars’ representatives tended to think of the world, versus what the world actually was, tended to be very, very, separate in her experience. He was right though. When the Hand of Desmond Michael Alexander the Third arrived, things would get very bad if there was a significant open rebellion underway.

  God - she’d probably want to talk to the rebels, instead of just dealing with them.

  “I can’t drop rocks from orbit on my own,” she told Vaughn instead.

  “Tell your staff I’ll add another zero to their special comp packages,” the Governor said flatly, and Cor shivered. If he was willing to throw that much money at it, he truly was scared of what would happen when the Hand arrived.

  “You know I’m good for it,” Vaughn said after a moment of silence.

  Cor also knew Vaughn wouldn’t go down without handing certain files to the Hand, so the money would have to be enough.

  “Fine,” she said flatly, then cut the connection.

  #

  “Turns out I shouldn’t underestimate miners, Alpha,” Anthony told Lori over the com. “Or you, for that matter. Seriously? The Army ain’t coming?”

  “Any of them that are left are busy pulling bodies from the wreckage,” Lori told him quietly. “The Scorpions?”

  “Turns out one of the miners had built himself a trebuchet as a hobby,” Anthony replied. “Mounted it on a rooftop and used to drop a hundred kilos of mining explosives on top of the barracks. Leveled the place,” he finished cheerfully.

  “All right,” she said. “We’re en route. Between your cells and the folks I’ve got on the squadron, we should be able to get some order in place - and then we’ll bring in some transmission gear.”

  “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’?” Anthony replied.

  “Something like that,” Lori told him, a moment of amusement managing to penetrate her veneer of shock after the sheer violence of the pass.

  “Well, the miners are ready to stand behind you,” he told her. “They remember your fa—”

  Silence. Even as the com cut off, there was a sudden bright flash on the horizon, in the direction of Karlsberg.

  “Hold on,” Leclair snapped. “Everybody, shockwave inbound - hit the deck.”

  The pilot matched actions to words, flipping every rotor to horizontal and driving the aircraft towards the ground. Lori was wondering just what Leclair was doing - and then the shockwave hit.

  Leclair had managed to get the gunship into the trees, sheltered from the worst of it, and it still took every erg of power the rotors could put out to hold the tilt-rotor aircraft in one place.

  Another gunship, which hadn’t made it as low, was caught by the shockwave and slammed into the trees with enough force to break both several trees and the aircraft in half. The explosion of the gunship’s fuel tanks and munitions was an exclamation point on the shockwave, and Lori stared at the fire that had been seven of her people in shock.

  “Everybody, get down on the ground,” Leclair ordered. “We’ll need to double check everything before we fly again - that’s going to have done a number on the rotors.”

  “What the hell was that?” Lori finally asked shockily as she reached for the com to try to raise Anthony again.

  “I’m only guessing,” Leclair said quietly, “but I think that was a kinetic strike. There’s no point grabbing the com, boss - even if I’m wrong, it’s only about what did it, not what happened.

  “Karlsberg is gone.”

  #

  Chapter 4

  Several hours after arriving aboard Tides of Justice found Damien joining Alaura in the office attached to her quarters. The Hand poured herself a glass of wine and offered the bottle to Damien.

  “Drink?”

  “Coffee, please,” he replied. “It’s a little early in the day for those of us without iron stomachs.”

  She raised her glass in silent acceptance and produced a carafe and a cup out of the collection of silverware and glasses on the small table next to her desk. Presumably, some minion from Harmon’s crew kept the table stocked - Damien knew from experience that the Hand’s cybernetic stomach allowed her to drink alcohol without getting drunk, and the woman tended to abuse that over drinking coffee.

  “How’s Olympus Mons?” she asked after filling his cup.

  “It’s winter,” Damien replied dryly. “Everyone who can’t get to the southern hemisphere has locked themselves in the mountain and is pretending there isn’t three feet of snow outside.”

  While the mountain wasn’t that far north, the section of it that housed what was currently the Mage-King’s palace was high up. Three feet of snow wasn’t an exaggeration - but you didn’t have to leave the hemisphere to avoid it, just travel to the foot of the mountain.

  “Ah, so that’s why you were so eager to join me on this mission,” Alaura concluded. The gray-haired woman perched on the edge of her desk, watching him carefully over the rim of her glass. “I don’t expect Ardennes to get that exciting.”

  “When His Majesty hints that it’s time for one of his pupils to get real world experience, said pupil obeys,” Damien observed dryly. “Also, Kiera is now thirteen, and in the throes of the worst teenage crush I’ve ever seen.”

  It took Alaura a long moment to realize how that related to Damien leaving Mars.

  “On you,” she finally realized aloud. “The girl second in line to the Throne has a crush on you, and your response is to flee the planet?”

  Damien glared at her for a moment, then corrected her.

  “System, Alaura,” he pointed out. “My response to a teenage crush by the daughter of the most powerful man alive was to flee the system.”

  The Hand, one of the thirteen most powerful men and women alive, laughed at him.

  “That seems surprisingly legitimate,” she replied. With a shrug and a hand gesture, she flipped the data on her wrist computer’s display onto a wallscreen.

  “Moving on to our actual job,” she continued, “this is Ardennes.”

  Damien studied the oddly colored planet on the screen carefu
lly. The pale purple native trees were extremely hardy and had managed to spread across easily seventy percent of the planet’s surface. Massive deposits of heavy metals and rare earths, combined with those trees, had made the planet an attractive target for colonization. A massive fault line, clearly visible even in the zoomed out holo, rendered one of the three continents not-quite-uninhabitable, but the other two were temperate and resource-rich.

  “MidWorld with a Navy refueling station,” he said aloud. The MidWorlds were the thirty-three systems that were fully self-sufficient, but didn’t have the massive industrial complexes of the original Core Worlds. “His Majesty said that would be our destination, but I think he believed you would have more up-to-date details.”

  “I do, but not as many as I’d like,” Alaura told him. “One of the - many - warning signs that something isn’t quite right on Ardennes is that the Runic Transceiver Array on the planet is restricted to government use. I’m getting reports, but they’re coming in by more roundabout routes than usual.”

  Damien leaned back in his seat, gesturing for her to continue. One of his many lessons on Mars had been that learning usually required simply listening.

  “Mage-Governor Vaughn has been in charge of Ardennes for thirty years now. That’s unusual, but not unheard of,” she allowed. “In that time, Ardennes has undergone an explosion of industry and resource extraction. Again, this isn’t unheard of, but there are rumors.”

  “We’ve learned the hard way not to ignore those kinds of rumors,” she continued grimly, and Damien nodded. He’d visited a world once where the locals had eventually been forced to overthrow a corporate occupation by force. They’d ended up becoming one of the most rabid UnArcana worlds, blaming the Mages of the Protectorate for not saving them.

  “We began asking questions and slipping agents in a year ago,” Alaura explained. “Shortly before that, small campaigns of violence began to pop up. Nothing really major - a couple of strikes turning into riots, a few bombings. Enough to draw our attention, but nobody died.”