Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars Page 4

  “If I shouldn’t trust Vaughn on anything else, why are we trusting him when he says his enemies blew up a town?”

  #

  Chapter 6

  Julia Amiri studied the device sitting on her tiny writing desk with a sigh. Technically, there was nothing illegal about a civilian on Ardennes owning even the frequency hopping high-powered communicator, though the military-grade encryption programming was certainly questionable.

  In practice, if the Ardennes Special Security Service learned that one of the many immigrants sharing apartments in Nouveau Versailles south-eastern quarter possessed the communicator, she’d be lucky if she lived long enough to be disappeared. They would assume, correctly, that the ex-bounty hunter was an offworld spy.

  So the real question was whether carrying the device was more likely to get her in trouble than leaving it in her room.

  The room in question was tiny, less than eight feet on a side and one of five single bedrooms around a central kitchen. The entire building was like that - shared tiny spaces for people living on the pittance that the Ardennes government required people to work for instead of receiving welfare.

  The tall, black-haired woman smiled grimly. There was no official reward for turning in offworld spies - after all, Ardennes’ government would insist they had nothing to hide from the Protectorate! - but that didn’t mean her roommates wouldn’t figure they would be paid for turning her in.

  They would be right, after all. She couldn’t risk it. She scooped the communicator into her purse with the small high velocity pistol. Unlike the communicator, the pistol was illegal, but would get her in much less trouble if found.

  Leaving the tiny room, Amiri quickly descended the fourteen flights of stairs to the ground - she wasn’t sure if the elevator had ever worked in this building. Certainly no-one was fixing it, and the stairs were hardly a burden for her.

  Trying not to openly show her disgust for the situation around her, Amiri joined the crowd outside. There were no vehicles on the streets here - the immigrants and other poor bastards swept up in the euphemistically named ‘Work Placement Program’ barely earned enough at their government set wage to pay their government set rent.

  The only people who benefited from Ardennes’ ‘social safety net’ were the corporations who played nicely with the government.

  With so many people moving on foot, even a tall woman with dark hair and spacer-pale skin didn’t attract much notice. Amiri reached her destination without interruption and silently slipped through the side door of the rundown bar.

  She trusted the kitchen in the bar to be cleaner than the one she shared. The beer, on the other hand, would have been happier poured back into the horse.

  Amiri ordered it anyway as she took a seat at a side table, her eye on the dais used for various performances - sometimes comedians, sometimes strippers. Tonight, the dais held a simple podium and microphone. No fancy banners, no dancing pole, just a completely anonymous speaker.

  The room was rapidly filling. The grapevine had carried the buzz about tonight’s speaker to a lot of ears. No details of who he was - but the rumor was that he had news about the Karslberg Massacre.

  She was halfway through the sandwich of tofu pretending to be steak when the growing noise level of the bar suddenly cut off. A man had emerged from the shadows to stand in front of the microphone. He was a blandly dressed, mousy man with faded brown hair and eyes.

  “I ain’t giving a name,” he said bluntly into the microphone, his amplified voice reaching across the room. “I ain’t asking for ‘em, either. I’m from the Freedom Wing, and I’m here to bring you The Truth!”

  Amiri could hear the capitals and classified the speaker as a shill. He was an ancillary member of the Wing - the main rebel group, so far as she had learned in six months - and hugely enthused with the risk and drama of his position.

  “The news tells you we blew up Karslberg,” the speaker said bluntly. “That, somehow, we dropped a rock from a sky the government owns to kill a town full of our friends and allies.”

  From the muttering around the room, Amiri hadn’t been the only one to disbelieve that. She’d once been a bounty hunter and seen some of the worst humanity had to offer - but people stupid enough to try stunts like that tended not to succeed at them.

  “My brothers, my sisters,” he gestured around the room. “Karlsberg revolted. The miners, driven by one demand too many, rose up in righteous fury and drove out the Scorpions! Standing shoulder to shoulder, they showed that we will not be slaves!”

  The muttering was a rumble now - an angry rumble, but one in support of the speaker.

  “Freedom Wing Alpha was heading there to raise the banner of planetwide rebellion when Vaughn struck.” The speaker’s voice was soft now, and Amiri strained with the rest of the room to hear. “Never forget, my brothers - Vaughn and his cronies own our skies.

  “His minions cast down fire from on high, and Karlsberg burned. Alpha was saved only because they were delayed by Vaughn’s attempt to use the Army to suppress the rebellion.

  “Mage-Governor Vaughn destroyed Karlsberg,” the Freedom Wing member suddenly bellowed, his words echoing around the bar as its occupants quailed. To outright accuse the governor of mass murder was a line even this friendly crowd were uncomfortable with.

  “He murdered fifty thousand of our brothers and sisters - and the Martian ships stood by and did nothing!”

  Now the crowd was turning ugly, and it wasn’t directed at the speaker. It was directed at the government. If they weren’t careful, there was going to be a riot here - and Amiri doubted that was what the Freedom Wing wanted. Seizing a small mining town with a surprise revolt was one thing - Nouveau Versailles wouldn’t fall to anything impromptu.

  “Alpha has a plan,” the speaker told them. “We will bring Vaughn down - in the time of our choosing. We know, now, that we can’t expect Mars to save us - we must save ourselves!”

  That, of course, was when the Scorpions kicked the door down.

  #

  The bouncer at the door reeled back - first from the shock of the door bursting open, and then from the stun batons the first red and black uniformed thugs employed gleefully. Amiri slid her chair away from the table, right up against the wall to both keep her out of view and clear her to move.

  Six Scorpions with stun batons cleared a space around the door, followed by six more carrying the familiar shape of modern stunguns. Equipped with advanced SmartDarts, the stunguns were much less likely to do permanent injury than the batons.

  Which, of course, said everything one needed to know about the Ardennes Special Security Service.

  The crowd was still angry, and Amiri doubted she was the only one in the bar with a weapon. Unlike most people, however, she was still paying just as much attention to the speaker from the Freedom Wing.

  He was trying to slip off the stage towards the back door - but didn’t make it before the last Scorpion entered.

  The officer was a blonde woman who approached Amiri’s own intimidating height, and she surveyed the room with eagle eyes. The Scorpion knew exactly who she was looking for, and her gaze settled on the Freedom speaker.

  “Mikael Riordan, you are under arrest for treason,” she snapped. “The rest of you will disperse.”

  As the crowd grumbled and started to shuffle, Amiri cursed silently. Apparently the speaker hadn’t just been a shill - Riordan was on the list of potential contacts she’d scraped from Ardennes’ planetary databases when she’d arrived. Her research suggested he reported directly to Alpha - the mysterious leader of the Wing - himself.

  The crowd clearly didn’t move fast enough for the Scorpions, who started pushing their way forward. Amiri watched in fascination as the workers responded by being less and less willing to move, the very effort by the Scorpions to force their way through making their progress harder.

  Riordan took advantage of the confusion to dash for the back door - but the Scorpion officer had been expecting something.
The rebel made it four steps before the crack of a stungun echoed across the bar, and the Freedom Wing speaker collapsed to the ground twitching.

  “Clear the room!” the officer snapped to her men. “Use whatever force is necessary!”

  The men with the stun batons grinned evilly and stepped forward, the ‘less-than-lethal’ weapons swinging freely.

  Amiri didn’t see who threw the first beer bottle. She did, from her hiding spot on the edge of the room, get a very clear view of one of the Scorpions being disarmed by a five-foot-nothing redheaded girl who proceeded to feed the thug his own weapon - on full power.

  It went downhill from there.

  The bounty hunter had no illusions how the brawl was going to end. The dozen Scorpions were outnumbered four to one, but had support outside and firearms. It would rapidly degrade to bullets, but many of the workers were armed and it wouldn’t be a clean win for the Scorpions.

  Riordan, on the other hand, was already down, disabled by the automatically tailored electronic charge of the smartdart.

  The situation was a nightmare - and her best chance to make contact with the resistance.

  A second wave of troopers - this bunch with more stunguns - charged through the door, and Amiri made up her mind. Hiding behind the chaos, she slipped along the wall to the door Riordan had almost reached.

  The rebel was heavier than he looked, but still light enough for the tall and muscular woman to easily drag him out the unlocked door into the alley. Practice in bringing in bounties unobtrusively helped her do so without attracting notice from anyone who’d care.

  “Stop right there!”

  Of course, there were Scorpions in the alley.

  She let Riordan fall to the dirty floor as she faced the pair of red and black uniformed men. They held stunguns and had uneasy looks in their eyes - probably the ones in the platoon the officer didn’t trust to really get it ‘stuck in.’

  “Please, sirs,” she simpered. “I’m just trying to get my husband home - we weren’t involved in any of this, we were just out for dinner!”

  The two ‘cops’ approached, eyeing her carefully. She was taller than either of them, though her current pose was ‘non-threatening and terrified.’

  “Sorry, miss,” one of them said gently. “New orders, no-one is allowed to leave the area until they’ve been questioned. If all’s as you say, you’ll be fine.”

  “Wait,” the other interrupted as he saw Riordan, “that’s…”

  Amiri moved. The Scorpion who’d recognized the rebel didn’t finish his sentence, a perfectly delivered jab to the throat half-crushing his larynx. He collapsed backwards in a struggle for breath that would kill him without medical aid.

  The other Scorpion had barely begun to react when she turned to him. She smashed her hand into the side of his head, throwing him off balance and hopefully breaking the sensitive electronics of his helmet. As he recoiled back, she hooked an ankle behind him and sent him crashing to the floor.

  She was on the ground next to him before he could rise, pinning him to the ground with a hand in the hollow of his throat while her other hand plunged home a tiny needle ejected from the bracelet she was wearing.

  For a moment, Amiri didn’t think the drug was going to work, then the man relaxed into unconsciousness. The other man was unconscious, the damage to his larynx likely to kill him in minutes.

  Sighing, Amiri knelt by his side. She’d hit him harder than she’d meant to. Twenty seconds of quick and dirty first aid rectified the worst of it, enough that he’d live long enough for his team to find him.

  Twenty seconds it looked like she’d had to spare. She hoisted the still unconscious Riordan into a fireman’s carry and took off down the alley at a fast lope.

  He’d better be useful. Unconscious or not, at least one of the Scorpions’ helmets would have uploaded video of her to its backup.

  #

  It took Riordan an unusually long time to sleep off the effects of the stun-darts. The smart weapons delivered an electric shock designed to disable; they weren’t generally very effective at knocking someone unconscious. Extended periods of unconsciousness usually meant the darts had missed a pre-existing condition.

  By the time the rebel awoke, Amiri had booked them into a small and dirty room in a rundown motel and stretched him out on the bed. She was about to boot up the medical routines on her personal computer - far too expensive a program for a ‘poor immigrant’ to own - when Riordan finally woke up.

  He jerked upright, cursing and looking around wildly.

  “Where am I?” he demanded.

  “Motel, about twenty blocks from where you were speaking,” Amiri replied. “You were out for a long time after they stunned you!”

  The Freedom Wing speaker looked at her in confusion.

  “I have a neuro-electric condition,” he said slowly, clearly buying himself time to think. “It doesn’t interact well with electric shocks. I was stunned?” He paused, thinking. “Shit, Scorpions! What happened?”

  “You went down, I dragged you out. Had to scuffle with a couple of the Scorpions myself, then brought you here.”

  “Is this place safe? They may call the cops!”

  “Mister Riordan,” Amiri said quietly, “the rooms look like this, they don’t have video cameras, and they rent by the hour. No-one in this motel is calling the police.”

  Riordan finally sort of relaxed, rising to a sitting position and regarding Amiri.

  “Thanks,” he said quietly. “I doubt the Scorpions wanted a pleasant discussion on the relative merits of free market capitalism versus concealed oligopolies. What’s your name?”

  “Jewel,” Julia Amiri replied instantly. “And from our red and black friends’ shouting, you’re Mikael Riordan?”

  “Yeah,” Riordan confirmed. “One time economics professor, one time Freedom Party member of parliament. Now public speaker for the Wing.”

  “You got a place to go, Mister Riordan?” Amiri asked. “I may have ended up on the Scorpions helmet cams.”

  “Damn,” he said softly. “I’m sorry. You can’t go back to wherever you were staying then - not if you’re on the WPP?”

  She nodded.

  “Damn,” he repeated. “Look, I’ve got a ride coming - soon as I signal, there’ll be a car coming, but they won’t have room for any extras.”

  He considered for a moment and then pulled a pad of old-fashioned paper from inside his scuffed-up suit blazer. Scrawling an address on it, Riordan handed it to Amiri.

  “That’s the address of a much nicer hotel than this one,” he told her. “Go there, tell them Lambda said to give you a room and a tab. They’ll take care of you.”

  “I don’t just want to hide,” Amiri replied with only partially falsified eagerness. Everything she’d seen on Ardennes was pissing her off. The reports she’d sent in would probably be far more valuable to fixing the planet than anything she could do with the resistance, but she still wanted her hands in it.

  Plus, a line of sight into the resistance would not hurt when Stealey arrived to sort things out.

  Riordan hesitated for a long moment, and Amiri couldn’t shake the suspicion it was as much being an attractive woman as having saved him that made up his mind. He grabbed the pad back and noted down a code.

  “You can call that number,” he said quietly. “We’ll sort out something from there, and if I need a hand with anything… I’ll contact the hotel. They’ll find you for me.”

  #

  Chapter 7

  Ardennes was, despite the ugliness Damien now knew was going on under the surface, an astonishingly pretty planet. Its heavy metal-rich crust and ripe-for-energy-extraction tectonic activity were what had brought the Protectorate’s attention to the world, but its indomitable ecosystem had won over its colonists’ hearts.

  Even from space, where most planets in the Protectorate were green with imported Terran life, Ardennes was a pale purple. Its trees and natural life had resisted Terran imports with a
success that had surprised the biochemists charged with setting up farms.

  Thankfully, Ardennes’s ecosystem was also edible to humans. Even when the local flora choked out farms, there was still plenty to eat.

  Tides of Justice was slowly approaching the planet, still several light seconds away, and Damien stood on the destroyer’s bridge next to Mage-Commander Harmon. Harmon stood next to the silver simulacrum of the Tides that any jump ship carried at its center, his hand gently nestled on the icon that, in a strange way, was the million ton warship.

  “What is that?” one of the sensor techs breathed. On the screens that surrounded the bridge with the view from thousands of cameras on the exterior of the vessel, Ardennes had rotated enough to show a thin red line.

  “That’s the reason the colony only occupies two of three continents,” Damien murmured. He’d seen pictures of the massive crack in the planet’s crust while researching Ardennes, but it was still awe-inspiring to realize you were looking at a volcano visible from orbit. “It’s the Zeller Fault - a single lava field that, well, can be seen from orbit.”

  “Our orbital slot is dropping us in above the Fault,” another tech reported.

  “That’s the opposite side of the planet from Nouveau Versailles,” Harmon objected. “Did they give a reason?”

  “Mage-Commodore Cor’s squadron are occupying the geostationary orbits above the colony,” the tech replied. “Apparently, the Governor started to get nervous after the strike.”

  Mention of the squadron drew Damien’s gaze to the data overlay on the visual of the planet ahead of them. A pair of cruisers, behemoths ten times the Tides‘ size, hovered on the same side of the planet they were being directed to. Four more, as Ardennes Control was advising, were settled in over the capital.

  Next to the ten million ton cruisers, it took Damien a moment to sort out the Ardennes Self Defense Force ships. Tau Ceti-built export destroyers, they lacked the magical amplifiers of the Martian Navy ships, but still carried all of their regular weaponry.