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

  “That changed about six months ago. Someone began launching a very well organized, very well equipped guerilla war. It lasted a month, maybe two. Then it quieted down – as if someone had made a very specific point.

  “More recently, a series of cruder, more vicious attacks has been launched,” she finished quietly. “Civilians have died – very different modus operandi, but still operating against Vaughn.

  “With the civilian deaths, Mage-Governor Vaughn has formally requested our assistance. I think something stinks,” she concluded, “but he has that right.”

  Damien slowly nodded, processing as best as he could.

  “So what do we do?” he asked carefully.

  “Three steps,” Alaura replied. “First, we stop the fighting – by whatever means necessary. There is a Navy cruiser squadron in system we can call on for heavy support, but I’d rather negotiate a cease fire.”

  “Second, we identify whatever grievances are triggering this revolt. If they’re legitimate, we arbitrate negotiations to find a compromise acceptable to everyone,” she shook her head. “It’s usually possible, especially when backed by a Hand.”

  “And third?” Damien asked.

  “Third, we punish the criminals,” she said flatly. “Murderers on both sides – rebels who blew up civilians, cops who gunned down innocents. The torturers, the killers – all of them spend a good long while in prison.”

  “Where there are legitimate grievances, we will correct them,” Alaura continued calmly. “But no-one kills or tortures the innocent and walks away.”

  Her words hung in the silent air as Damien considered them. While he knew Hands usually did attempt to find workable compromises, they were more known for the first and third of her steps than the second.

  A ping on Alaura’s computer attracted both of their attentions, and Alaura slowly read whatever showed up on her screen.

  “Interesting,” she murmured slowly.

  “My lady?”

  “I don’t normally like to jump to the interstellars’ bidding,” she told him. “But the CEO of MagnaCorp Interstellar just asked me to meet with him. And offered to break free any two hour stretch that worked for me.”

  “And?” Damien asked.

  “MagnaCorp operates in thirty-six systems and employs just over fifteen million people,” Alaura told him. “Rickard’s time is booked in five minute chunks – six months in advance.”

  “He’ll also have the resources to know I’m heading to Ardennes – and one of their big operations is there.”

  She checked her schedule and glanced back up at Damien with a thin smile.

  “Feel up to a shuttle flight, My Lord Envoy?”

  Damien returned the smile.

  “Only if I get to fly, My Lady Hand,” he told her.

  #

  Despite having kept up his simulator time while secluded in Olympus Mons, Damien let out a sigh of relief as he settled the agile Navy shuttle on the landing pad outside MagnaCorp’s headquarters on Tau Ceti f. Chilly and damp, the planet had decided to show them an unfriendly face with a vicious storm taking shape over the southern continent as they were landing.

  Despite his rustiness, he’d managed to take the shuttle through the rain and gale-force winds without any issues. No-one else needed to know how white his knuckles had been through the process!

  The rain continued to hammer down around the shuttle, make a hissing sound as the drops hit and evaporated from the shuttle’s hull, still heated from entry.

  “We’ll meet Mister Rickard inside,” Alaura told him, unstrapping herself from the co-pilots seat. “I don’t blame him for not wanting to come out in this to greet us,” she gestured at the rain.

  Damien nodded and gestured for her to lead the way. They stepped out into the rain, but none of the drops hit them. He glanced at Alaura and realized she was holding a shield of kinetic energy over their heads. It seemed a waste of energy to him, but he had been trained in a tradition that avoided the open use of magic as a sign of humility.

  “It would never do for a Hand or an Envoy to appear looking like soaked rats,” she murmured to him as they approached the main doors for the central sky scraper of MagnaCorp Interstellar’s corporate campus. The campus was about five kilometers outside Tau Ceti f’s largest city, but the central tower rivaled any of the skyscrapers of the official downtown to their west.

  The skyscraper was barely five minutes’ walk away from the landing pad – probably closer than Damien would have been comfortable putting it, but convenient.

  He followed Alaura as she walked through the main doors of the skyscraper like she owned the place, walking up to the front desk as if walking in out of the storm was a normal thing.

  “I am here to meet Tomas Rickard,” she told the receptionist before the elegantly coiffed blond young man finished gawking at her. “We are expected.”

  “So you are,” an amused voice interrupted before the receptionist found his voice. “Space Traffic Control called ahead – I apologize for the weather.”

  “Whatever worlds we travel to, Mother Nature still does not respond to our every whim, Mister Rickard,” Alaura replied, giving the speaker a small nod. “Envoy Montgomery, this is Tomas Rickard, Chief Executive Officer of MagnaCorp Interstellar. Mister Rickard, this is…”

  “Envoy Damien Montgomery,” Rickard interrupted, closing the space and offering his hand to Damien. MagnaCorp’s CEO was an immense man, with skin and hair so fair as to be almost pure white and ice blue eyes. “It is a pleasure to meet the man who ended the Blue Star Syndicate’s depredations upon our galaxy.”

  Damien shook his hand.

  “Many others played a part in breaking apart Blue Star,” he admitted. “You are very well informed – I was not aware my Warrant had been announced in Tau Ceti.”

  “It is… a job requirement,” Rickard said grimly. “I am aware of your Warrant, and also that you and Lady Stealey are headed to Ardennes.” The CEO glanced at the receptionist, then jerked his head towards an elevator.

  “Let’s discuss this in my office,” he continued. “I don’t think what either of us has to say is for everyone’s ears.”

  #

  Rickard’s office was large, as expected of the head of an interstellar corporation, occupying the entire north-western quarter of the top floor of the building. The windows on the two exterior walls gave the CEO and his guests a spectacular view of the vicious storm pounding the complex outside.

  Inside, the office was surprisingly austere for its scale. A significant chunk of it had been re-purposed to a conference room with absolute top-of-the-line communication equipment, but the rest was almost empty beyond a large but simple desk and a collection of more comfortable chairs by an auto-bar.

  He gestured them to the chairs and stepped over to the auto-bar.

  “Drinks? The bar makes a fantastic fortified hot chocolate.”

  A minute later, all three of them settled into the sinfully comfortable chairs with their hot chocolates, watching the lightning outside.

  “I must admit, Mister Rickard, I was surprised by your request,” Alaura told him. “It’s rare that the head of an interstellar corporation is willing to put that much effort into meeting with a Hand.”

  “And it always means we need a favor,” Rickard admitted cheerfully. “In this case, I’m hoping to be able to do you a favor as well.”

  “Oh?” Alaura answered, uncommittedly.

  The CEO sighed and then gestured to the window next to them. An image that Damien guessed had been preloaded for activation loaded onto a video screen concealed in the glass.

  It had been, at some point, a huge industrial complex. Now, a third of the complex was lost to a crater that started outside the image, and many of the remaining buildings were knocked down. Any fires had clearly been put out by the time the photograph was taken, but the complex was probably a complete write off.

  “This was the fusion reactor manufacturing plant on Ardennes,” Rickard said qui
etly. “We built and tested fusion cores from one megawatt toys to one gigawatt mass-production plants here, then exported them across the Protectorate. This shot was as of two weeks ago, the latest news I have from Ardennes.”

  “What happened?” Damien asked, leaning forward to get a closer look.

  “Our plant ended up as the center point of a mid-sized industrial district just outside one of Ardenes’ larger cities. The factory next door was a chemical processing plant. Something went wrong and it blew the hell up.

  “We were on track for a zero fatal accident fiscal year,” Rickard continued quietly. “On the scale we operate, that is something to be damned proud of. And then these idiots killed two hundred and fifty-six of my people.”

  “There was an investigation. Their conclusion was that our neighbors, an Ardennes native corporation, had failed to comply with basic safety standards for the processes they were following.”

  He held up a hand before Alaura or Damien could speak, taking a moment to breathe deeply.

  “We were then informed by Ardennes’ court system that the corporation in question had been granted an exemption from the legal safety code to ‘encourage their investment’. Therefore, under Ardennes law, they were not legally liable for death benefits to their own people’s families, let alone my people.”

  “We will be paying for the benefits ourselves, obviously,” he concluded. “But I have already told my Board that we will not be rebuilding on Ardennes.”

  “They gave an exemption to the safety codes?” Damien asked incredulously.

  “When we move into a system, we ask for a lot of exemptions and special cases,” Rickard admitted. “Usually, it’s to try to make sure our operations only have to meet Protectorate-wide standards instead of more stringent local ones, and we rarely get many of them. In this case, my understanding is that several of the major shareholders are friends of the Governor.”

  “I see,” Alaura said slowly. “You can prove this?”

  “The details of the court files my local president was provided weren’t supposed to leave the Ardennes system,” Rickard told them. “They’ve been forwarded to your ship, along with all of our local research and information.”

  “That… could be immensely valuable,” Alaura replied. “Thank you.”

  “It’s worse than you think, my Lady Hand,” Rickard warned her. “However bad you think it is, its worse.

  “Vaughn has been determined to drive a major industrial revolution on Ardennes, at any cost. A lot of the money from that has poured into the hands of his friends and allies – and more has gone into funding the security service to keep a lid on protest.”

  “If it was really that bad, he’d have been voted out,” Damien pointed out. “Everything I see shows his party continuing to dominate the planetary legislature.”

  Rickard sighed, looking embarrassed for the first time since they’d arrived.

  “I know, for a fact, that Vaughn has fixed at least the last two Governor elections, and has been heavily restricting who can run for the Legislature,” he admitted. “I know we have an obligation to report that,” he continued, “but I only had two facilities of the size of the one on Ardennes. I couldn’t risk him shutting us down.”

  “Now,” he shrugged. “I’ve paid for every surviving one of my people, and their families and the families of the dead, to be relocated to Sherwood. I’d rather start again from bare rock than touch Ardennes again.”

  #

  Chapter 5

  Damien and Alaura were barely out of the shuttle when Mage-Commander Harmon intercepted them.

  “You need to come with me,” the Tides of Justice’s commanding officer told them. “I’ve ordered the ship prepared to travel ASAP, but the decision is yours and you need to be fully informed.”

  Alaura wordlessly gestured for the Commander to lead the way, and Damien followed the pair deeper into the ship.

  Harmon didn’t say anything further as he led them to a chamber in the ship that the Envoy hadn’t seen on either of two his times aboard.

  “Where is this?” he asked aloud.

  “Communications Central,” Harmon replied. “We get a lot of transmissions directed at us on a day-to-day basis and, well,” he shrugged, “we also eavesdrop on everything going on around us. It’s the job of the folks down here to sort it all and let myself and you two know what’s important.”

  The Mage officer led his way into the room. Despite the impression Damien had got from Harmon’s description, the room was empty. Viewscreens covered the walls, surrounding the half-dozen empty consoles to provide an ability to view dozens of streams simultaneously.

  “It’s also, for a variety of reasons, one of the most secure rooms on the ship,” Harmon continued. “Take a seat, both of you.”

  Without waiting to see if the Hand or the Envoy obeyed, he fiddled with the controls and brought up a recording.

  “This was forwarded us to by the Tau Ceti Runic Transceiver Array while you were meeting Rickard,” he said quietly. “The recording is audio only, obviously.”

  The Runic Transceiver Arrays were massive constructs, networks of runes that filled large domes with a complexity that rivaled the core sections of a jump or amplifier matrix. All of that focus and energy, however, was targeted on a single room slightly less than three meters square.

  From that room, a Mage could throw his voice to a single, specific, other RTA anywhere in the galaxy. He had to know where the other RTA was to within a few planetary diameters, so an RTA station also included a giant array of computers, and the message was audio only, so everything in that room was recorded.

  The recording started playing.

  “Tau Ceti RTA, this message is for Hand Alaura Stealey, Priority One.”

  The audio was distorted, static and other noises running under it. The inability to provide a clear audio signal prevented the RTAs being used for any kind of data transmission – only voice was useful, which also prevented any security except locking down the RTA itself. Despite the distortion, Damien recognized the voice instantly: it was Desmond Alexander himself.

  “We have received further updates from Mage-Governor Vaughn on Ardennes,” the recording continued. “He has requested that we accelerate your arrival, as the situation has drastically escalated.

  “Twelve hours prior to the transmission of this message, unknown terrorists managed to drop a crude kinetic weapon on the town of Karlsberg. Shortly thereafter, a military relief column intended to deliver medical supplies and desperately needed heavy machinery was destroyed in an ambush using heavy anti-tank weapons.”

  “You are directed to proceed as soon as reasonably possible to the Ardennes system,” Alexander continued. “Beyond that, I leave to your discretion – but the son of a bitch who just blew away fifty thousand people must be brought to justice.

  “Olympus Mons, ending transmission.”

  The room was silent for a long moment.

  “The Tides of Justice is prepared to move on your order, Lady Hand,” Harmon said quietly.

  “Make it so, Mage-Commander,” Alaura replied flatly. “You can let your communication team have their center back, too.”

  Damien glanced over at her. A few things in what he was hearing didn’t add up, and from Alaura’s sour expression, she was thinking much the same.

  “Your office?” he queried aloud.

  #

  Alaura threw herself into the chair in her office, turning back to face Damien with a determined expression on her face. A gesture snapped up a holographic screen from the personal computer wrapped around her arm, and she studied for a long moment before sighing.

  “We have the data from Rickard,” she told him. “I’m less convinced of its value now, though.”

  Damien leaned back against the wall next to the door, considering the situation.

  “We still need to deal with the Governor if he’s fixing elections,” he pointed out. “We can’t let that stand.”

  Alaura made
a throw away gesture, shutting down her PC screen.

  “Yes, but that just dropped off the priority list,” she admitted. “From my own research and Rickard’s information, I’m reasonably sure Vaughn is a good chunk of the problem on Ardennes. If things had stayed at the urban guerilla level, we had options.

  “But,” she said grimly, “someone just blew up a town. Fifty thousand people, Damien.”

  He’d been trying not to think about it.

  “What use is His Protectorate if we do not protect people?” he whispered, and she nodded.

  “Regardless of what Mage-Governor Michael Vaughn may or may not have done to provoke it, we cannot – we will not – permit that to stand unchallenged and unavenged.”

  A shiver ran through the ship as the engines engaged. The runes on the floor flared slightly to Damien’s eyes, their magic counter-acting the acceleration to provide a consistent gravity.

  Silently, he opened his own PC and pulled up the data on Karlsberg. A mining town with a population of fifty thousand, one hundred and sixty-two as per the last census. What little information he had hardly suggested a stronghold of the planetary government or a strategic target.

  “I don’t trust Vaughn,” he said quietly, looking at an image of a rundown town with some kind of military barracks on the outskirts.

  “You shouldn’t,” the Hand replied. “Everything I’ve seen suggests he’s slime, the worst kind of Governor we have. If it wasn’t for the Karlsberg attack, I’d happily roll in and remove him. That has to wait, now, until we deal with whatever bastard killed a town.”

  “Fifteen destroyers,” Damien murmured, reviewing the stats on the Ardennes’ Self Defense Force. “Looks like they’re mostly in orbit.”

  Alaura stopped glaring at her desk and looked at him. “What are you getting at, Damien?”

  “The ASDF should have spotted anyone getting into position to drop an improvised kinetic,” he said quietly. “And if I was going to risk that, I’d have gone for a more important target than a back-country mining town.