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

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  As Damien and Rose entered his office, he watched as Amiri effortlessly and implacably cut off the camera crew. While the Governor appeared to understand his meaning, the crew had the same assumption of rectitude that reporters and camera crews had always had.

  His ex-bounty hunter bodyguard simply stepped into the gap between Rose and her crew and looked at them. It helped that Amiri, over a foot taller than Damien’s own diminutive height, towered over all three members of the crew.

  The door slid shut behind them and Governor Rose crossed to the massive window looking out on her world with a gasp.

  “I… forgot how beautiful it is,” she admitted, looking out across the planet. “My ancestors were determined to keep life on Panterra simple. No space stations, no ships. I have seen my world from shuttles from time to time, but this is… magnificent.”

  “Panterra is only the fourth world I’ve seen through that window,” Damien noted. “Mars, Earth, Tellemar, and now Panterra. Even on Earth or Mars, you can’t see their scars from orbit.”

  Rose nodded slowly, taking a deep breath and turning back to him.

  “I meant every word I said for the cameras, Hand Montgomery,” she told him quietly. “We were trying to evacuate, but that same desire for a simple life, well… we don’t have the capability to move millions of people on a few hours’ notice. Millions would have died without you, my lord. And bringing Oliver and his scum to justice? We are infinitely in your debt.”

  “I serve Mars, Governor,” Damien reminded her. “But you must remember that I cannot solve all your problems for you.”

  “With the intelligence retrieved from Oliver’s people’s computers and the aid of your Mage-Captain Jakab’s Marines, the Neo-Puritan Liberation Front will shortly be no more,” Rose replied in satisfaction. “You’ve certainly solved our largest problem.”

  “Killing terrorists buys time, Governor,” the Hand said gently. “It’s not really a solution.” He picked up the parchment Christoffsen had handed him earlier, studying the seal while carefully not looking at the Governor.

  “I call the destruction of the NPLF a pretty good solution, myself. What’s your point, my lord?” she asked.

  With a sigh, Damien handed her the parchment. Rose looked at it in confusion, then back up at him.

  “What is this?”

  “That, Governor, is the formal notification that the Government of Panterra has been found in violation of the Charter of the Protectorate,” he explained. “The status of the descendants of the Neo-Puritan colonists as second-class citizens does not meet the standards required of member governments on a number of criteria. My staff will have a formal report with detailed recommendations to you by tomorrow.

  “In any case, a Commission will be impaneled by the Protectorate within thirty days,” he continued. “We dispatched a courier to the nearest Runic Transceiver Array last night. The lead members of that commission should be on their way from Mars – or wherever his Majesty decides to pull them from – within a few days.”

  Governor Rose tore the seal open, reading the stark formal words of the notification.

  “I did not expect this,” she said bluntly. “I thought you were to help us.”

  “Governor Rose, it is not my job to uphold your government or maintain your society,” Damien said bluntly. “It is my job to serve the Protectorate.

  “Killing terrorists is necessary. As I said, it buys you time. True solutions require the removal of the underlying issues. I do not pretend that this is easy, or quick, or that we, as outsiders, have all of the solutions. The purpose of the Commission is not to tell your world how to exist.

  “The purpose of the Commission is to help your people find a better way.”

  Chapter 4

  “She looks upset,” Amiri noted, stepping into Damien’s observation deck office. “Is she going to be a problem?”

  “No,” Damien told her. “She’ll come around quickly, she’s just very angry at the NPLF right now.”

  His bodyguard walked across the excessively large room, her footsteps echoing on the metal floor. “How can you be so sure?” she asked, joining him in looking out the window.

  “Because the wheels that turned to create the Commission started about twelve years ago with the doctoral thesis of one Maria Rose,” he replied. “She’s angry right now, but she was the one who drew the Protectorate’s attention to the problem and predicted that, without a solution to the political and economic ghetto the Neo-Puritans were stuck in, we’d see an armed insurrection or terrorist movement inside of twenty years.

  “She’ll come around,” he repeated. “Governor Rose understands she rules the entire planet, not just the fifty-eight percent that voted for her.”

  “Is that based on one meeting with her?”

  “We were provided extensive briefing materials by the local Protectorate office,” Damien pointed out gently. “They covered her career in some depth.”

  “My focus was on the parts of the briefing about the people who were going to be shooting at you,” Amiri told him. “Speaking of which, what part of the briefing said that actually going alone when the terrorists ask you to come alone was a good idea?”

  “The part where I was pretty sure said terrorists could tell if I was alone in the shuttle, and had explosives set up to kill ten million people,” he said gently. “You know I’m not suicidal, Julia.”

  “I’ve watched you in action, my lord,” she replied. “There are days I have my doubts.”

  Damien turned to look at his bodyguard, shaking his head with a tired smile. ‘Tired’ seemed to sum up how he felt most of the time these days.

  “Did you look into their weapons?” he asked.

  “I did,” she confirmed, sighing. “It’s not as blatant as it might have been. The missiles were Tau Ceti manufacture. The rocket launchers and machine guns came from Amber. Hell, the body armor was Martian.”

  “But?”

  “But the guns were top-line, latest-issue Legatan manufacture,” Amiri continued. “The sensors you mentioned? Top-line, Legatan manufacture. The handful of machine guns we recovered intact had been updated with the latest optics and electronics – some Amber, some Legatan.

  “If I wasn’t looking for a common point, I don’t think I’d have been suspicious,” she pointed out. “But, since I was, there’s enough. The biggest point I noticed? The gear the NPLF had varied in age and quality – but where they had top-line, brand new equipment it was Legatan.”

  “I figured,” Damien sighed.

  Legatus was one of the Protectorate’s Core Worlds, the earliest colonies mankind had established after the Mage-King had built the jump-ships and trained Jump Mages to take humanity to the stars.

  Unlike the other Core Worlds, when the Legatan colonists had arrived, they’d ordered their Mages to get back on the ships and go home. Legatus was the first, and still the most important, UnArcana World. Magic was banned on those worlds. Mages identified in their population were shipped off-world to be taken in and trained by Mage families on other worlds.

  Legatus and the other UnArcana Worlds worked with the Protectorate and the Mage Guild – they had to, or no cargo would ever travel to their systems – but their laws on magic were very strict. They accepted the Charter of the Protectorate… but not the Compact between Mundane and Mage.

  It made them problem children for the Mage-King – and Legatus was the largest problem child of all. Damien’s involvement in the rebellion on Ardennes had brought him into contact with a Legatan agent, and he’d learned that the secretive Legatus Military Intelligence Directorate had funneled weapons and supplies to that rebellion.

  Now, they could see the same ploy in action on another Protectorate world.

  “What do you think they’re up to, Julia?” he asked Amiri.

  “Trouble,” was the only answer she could provide, and he grunted agreement.

  His brooding over the rebels’ equipment was interrupted by a ping o
n his wrist computer. The Duke’s bridge crew was contacting him.

  “Montgomery,” he answered calmly.

  “My lord Hand, we have a jump flare in the outer system,” one of the junior officers reported. “A courier ship has jumped in. They are requesting your authorization codes to release an encrypted packet.”

  “A response from our courier to Tau Ceti?” Damien asked. “That was fast.”

  “No, sir,” the officer told him. “They apparently are here directly from Mars.”

  “Get me a channel,” Damien ordered. “I’ll transmit my codes.”

  A courier that had come directly from Mars looking for him was definitely important – and almost certainly bad news.

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  The courier ship was a tiny little thing barely big enough to contain quarters for the five Mages and ten regular crew who ran it. It was small enough that maintaining the runes necessary to provide magical gravity was a minor task for her crew – and too small for any type of artificial gravity but magical.

  Courier ships like this one also had some of the most secure computer storage available to the Protectorate, and it turned out that Damien not only needed his regular security codes but actually had to remote link his Hand itself into the courier’s computer.

  The tiny gold icon that served as the symbol of his rank as a Hand of the Mage-King of Mars, authorized to speak with Desmond Michael Alexander’s voice and wield the Mage-King’s authority outside Sol, also functioned as an override chip for most computers built in the Protectorate.

  Finally, once the courier’s computers accepted that he was who he said he was, they disgorged a single digital file that downloaded itself to his computer and then wiped itself from the courier.

  Damien had never seen security like it before, so he was unsurprised when the desk console chimed and part of the window facing out over Panterra turned into a wallscreen showing the familiar gray-haired face of the Mage-King himself.

  “Damien, I hope the situation on Panterra has been resolved,” the King said crisply. “This courier was dispatched less than a day after you left Tellemar. Since I had all the information here and the courier would only be a day later than one from Tellemar, I’m sending it directly from Mars.

  “If the situation on Panterra is not resolved to your satisfaction, I leave how long you must stay to your discretion. But we have a major situation in the MidWorlds, and you are both my closest Hand, and have relationships I hope can help to cool things down.”

  “The Míngliàng system has laid a formal complaint against your home system Sherwood and their new Interstellar Patrol,” Alexander continued. “They have accused Sherwood of piracy, murder, and effectively waging an undeclared war against them.

  “Tucked in the details of their complaint is a reference to the Antonius system and what Governor Wong calls ‘claim-jumping’ there by Sherwood miners. Regardless of what is actually going on, I suspect the Antonius system is a key factor.”

  Damien paused the video and quickly checked his wrist computer. Antonius was roughly halfway between Míngliàng and Sherwood, an uninhabited and uninhabitable system that was nevertheless extremely rich in easily accessed resources. Neither Míngliàng nor his home system had large asteroid belts to fuel their industries, but Antonius, eight light years from both, had had at least five planets reduced to asteroids by some cataclysmic event in the past.

  There were enough resources in Antonius to fuel both systems’ industry for ten thousand years, but the records he’d downloaded from Mars before leaving showed a trail of complaint and counter-complaint going back five years. Sighing, he unpaused the recording.

  “The courier has all of the information we have on all three systems,” Alexander stated. “We are obligated under the Charter to investigate Governor Wong’s complaint. Almost more importantly, Míngliàng has a fleet of sixteen Tau Ceti-built Lancer-class destroyers. If Wong decides to take unilateral action, Sherwood’s Patrol may or may not be able to handle them, but we would face the first inter-system civil war of the Protectorate’s history.”

  The Mage-King of Mars paused, shaking his head at the camera.

  “That would be a disaster, Damien,” he said. “If Sherwood is engaging in piracy on a national scale, we are facing one of the worst crises of the last century. If they’re not, the potential for civil war is a worst case scenario all on its own.

  “I considered sending someone else,” Alexander admitted. “It is your home system being accused, after all. But you’re the closest by far. Even if you take a day or two to wrap up everything on Panterra, you’ll be there a week before anyone else I could send.

  “More, whatever the hell is going on, the McLaughlin is more likely to listen to you than anyone else I have.”

  Damien was surprised. Unless something had changed in the last four years, there was only one person who would be called the McLaughlin: the head of the system’s most powerful Mage family. Apparently Miles James McLaughlin had been elected again.

  “I’ve forwarded all of the information we have,” Alexander repeated. “The courier commander has been ordered to accompany you to Míngliàng and remain at your disposal while you deal with the situation. Neither system has completed a Runic Transceiver Array yet, so you’ll be limited to communication by starship courier.

  “Don’t go without the Duke of Magnificence,” the Mage-King ordered. “Beyond that, I leave the resolution to your discretion. You have authority to commandeer whatever force you need to secure the situation once you know what’s going on.

  “I have faith that you can keep it from coming to that,” he concluded, “but I trust your judgment. Stop this mess before Wong or McLaughlin can drag their people into a goddamn war.

  “Good luck.”

  Chapter 5

  “That… is going to be a giant headache,” Mage-Captain Kole Jakab said calmly. The Duke of Magnificence’s commanding officer was a tall man, with the pale skin of a lifelong spacer for all he’d been born on the mother world itself.

  Damien had called Jakab, Christoffsen and Amiri together to view the Mage-King’s missive. While arguably for his eyes only, his chief three subordinates would be called upon to help him take on the task. He preferred them to be fully briefed.

  “I intend to head directly to Míngliàng,” he told them, feeling drained. “There, I will speak with Governor Wong and see what we can sort out. I’ve reviewed the evidence provided by Governor Wong and, well, none of it is decisive.”

  “That seems odd,” Christoffsen replied. The ex-Governor had already started pulling up information on his wrist computer. He had the rare talent, often found in academics, of being able to read and carry on a conversation. “He’s leveled a formal complaint and asked for Protectorate intervention. That’s not something a Governor would do lightly.”

  “They’ve had a lot of attacks, Robert,” Damien noted. “Eighteen, at last count. Fifteen of them were on ships traveling to or from the Antonius system, a system Míngliàng and Sherwood technically share possession of… and they aren’t being particularly polite about the sharing. There have been no survivors, which means over a thousand of Governor Wong’s citizens are dead, and Sherwood appears to be the most likely suspect.”

  “That’s your homeworld,” Amiri said softly. “What do you think?”

  “Governor McLaughlin spent his military career fighting pirates,” he replied. “I find it difficult to believe he’d turn his brand new anti-piracy patrol into pirates. Regardless of whether or not Sherwood is responsible, however, someone has killed over a thousand people. We have no choice but to intervene.”

  Jakab had been checking something on his wrist computer, and he now threw an image up onto the wallscreen layered over the observation deck window. It was a swept back shape with smooth lines, looking like it belonged underwater instead of in deep space.

  “This is a Sherwood Hunter-class frigate,” the Navy officer explained. “She’s six megatons – over five times as larg
e as one of our modern destroyers, almost exactly six times as large as the export destroyers Míngliàng has. Our last reports say that Sherwood has six of them, with another six nearing completion.

  “There’s your reason for the formal complaint, Professor,” he told Christoffsen. “Governor Wong is terrified that Sherwood will shortly have enough jump-capable warships to attack his system directly. Hell, if the McLaughlin flies four or five of those into Antonius and declares he’s taking complete ownership of the system, there is nothing Míngliàng’s fleet can do.”

  “If Wong knows that, he has to be doing something about it,” Amiri said. “Even if he’s sent a complaint to us, if he and Sherwood are in competition, there’s no way he can allow the McLaughlin to build that much bigger a fleet than Míngliàng.”

  “An arms race,” Damien agreed with a nod. “When I left Sherwood, no one really cared about Míngliàng. A few of the business people were grouchy about the deal over Antonius, but… the man in the street wouldn’t have been willing to embrace war.”

  “My main concern, my lord,” Jakab said calmly, “is that the Duke of Magnificence is not capable of engaging either system fleet. Either sixteen Lancers or six Hunters would be an even match at best for my ship.”

  “I have no intention of single-handedly waging war against an entire planetary government, Mage-Captain,” Damien told him dryly.

  “This time,” his bodyguard muttered, and he turned a tired, but amused, glare on her.

  “I had a battleship last time,” he pointed out. “No, Captain, if it appears that it may become necessary for us to fight, I will call for reinforcements. That is a large part of why His Majesty has assigned Mage-Commander Renzetti’s courier ship to us.

  “We are going to Míngliàng to stop a war. I have no intentions of actually fighting one.”

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