Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars (22 page)

#

Every step forward and down from the first ambush left Amiri waiting for the second shoe to drop. Half a dozen guys with light gear were a lot less resistance than she’d been expecting. Despite the assurances that the Bastille’s relied almost entirely on automated security, she hadn’t really believed that shutting everything down with Montgomery’s codes would really see them through.

The first ambush remained the only ambush, however, as they descended ten floors to the underground levels of the Bastille and approached the heavy security hatch sealing the Bastille’s currently impotent command center away from the rest of the fortress prison.

“No explosives,” she ordered. Glancing at the array of weapons the rebels were carrying, she sighed. “No bullets, either. Gas grenades first, then lasers -
carefully
,” she warned the other two gunners carrying battle lasers.

Once she was sure the rebels - not a group known for being disciplined troops at the best of times - were going to follow her orders, she punched the code Montgomery’s data key had given her into the pad. The heavy hatch groaned and slowly began to move.

The grenadiers didn’t
quite
follow her orders, she noted. Of the grenades thrown through as the door began to open, at least two were smoke grenades, not gas grenades.

Given the thermal optics on the lasers, that worked out quite well.

Amiri dove through the hatch once it was open enough for her, relying on the smoke to cover her arrival. Flashes on the thermal scope marked weapons fire aimed at her, and she returned fire. Invisible pulses of lased light burned paths through the smoke and vaporized flesh.

Other thermal signatures hit the ground, Scorpions giving up the fight. A few seconds of smoke-filled chaos, and then silence reigned as the air exchange labored mightily to clear the air.

As the smoke faded, Amiri leveled her laser on one of the men who’d hit the floor. He blinked away the smoke, his eyes red and wide he stared at the business end of the crystalline lasing chamber.

“Play nice, now,” she instructed. Glancing around the room, she saw that the rebels were efficiently cuffing the wounded and uninjured alike. It didn’t look like any of the Freedom Wing fighters had been injured, but four more Scorpions were dead, with six prisoners.

The Scorpions apparently had
reduced
the manpower at the prison from when the police had run it.

“You look like you’re in charge here,” she addressed the prisoner at the end of her weapon. His collar bore the insignia of a Captain, which meant he was the shift commander if not the base commander; with less than twenty men on site, she wasn’t ruling out the latter.

“You’re
insane
,” he told her. “What do you want?”

“I answer to a higher authority than you,” Julia Amiri, Protectorate Secret Service Agent, told the paramilitary officer bluntly. “What I want from
you
is the locations of the Freedom Wing prisoners that were brought here over the last few days. Can I trust you to pull that out of the system without doing something stupid?”

The Scorpion officer nodded slowly, rising and returning to his chair at a gesture from her laser. As he began to work, she linked into the system from her personal computer and began to see what information she could access.

Ah!
That was the external sensors.

Oh.

She hit the communicator.

“Brute, you have incoming,” she told the pilot. “I’m only
seeing
transports, but I’m guessing they’ll be jets or helicopters of some kind to keep you busy.”

“Oh, what a lovely day,” he replied with a laugh. “I was starting to get bored.”

“You’re nuts,” Amiri told him. “Pass it on to the Envoy as well,” she reminded him. “If they’ve pulled that many troops out of Versailles, he should be clear all the way in!”

#

Among the many talents of the Legatus Phantom V, it turned out, was the ability to tune its stealth coating to produce a completely false radar return. A pointless trick in daylight, it definitely had its uses on a foggy evening like the one wrapping Nouveaux Versailles.

Damien sat in the co-pilot’s seat next to Sierra, watching in silence as the Legatan woman deftly negotiated her way through the fog and the late evening air traffic towards the spherical marble dome of the Ardennes Runic Transceiver Array.

They were close enough now that he could begin to feel the thrum of the power of the Array’s runes. The hemispherical dome was identical to others he’d seen pictures of, though the one at Olympus Mons was buried underground with the rest of the Mountain’s runes and infrastructure.

Underneath that dome were layers of silver runes, each inlaid into one of sixty-four separate hemispheres, each smaller than the one outside it and linked to the layer beneath.

Building an Array was a project of years, dozens of highly trained Mages, and massive amounts of money. Necessary as they were for interstellar communication, most of the Fringe worlds didn’t have one.

Ardennes, so far as most of its people were concerned, might as well not. The marble dome was inside a ten foot tall concrete wall, broken at even intervals with guard towers. A ring of anti-aircraft turrets sat inside that wall, one of the guns tracking the helicopter as they approached.

“ARTA Control, this is flight F-451,” Sierra said into the communicator. “We are en route to the ARTA Landing Pad, I have Mister Brad Jolie aboard for his scheduled thirty minute usage window.”

She turned to Damien.

“Jolie is a mid-level executive and Mage with StellarCharm Interstellar,” she told him. “He
could
use the RTA to talk to his headquarters, but never has. We borrowed his authorization codes - and nobody at the Array should know what he looks like.”

“Flight F-451,” the radio crackled. “You are cleared to approach and land at pad two. The RTA schedule is clear, the coordinator will meet Mister Jolie at the main entrance. Welcome to ARTA, F-451.”

“We’re in,” Sierra whispered. “I’ll get us on the pad. After that, it’s up to you, Mister Montgomery.”

“It’s a glorified phone call,” Damien reminded her. “I think I’ll be fine.”

The helicopter settled onto the pad, and Sierra gestured toward the exit.

#

The coordinator was a slim woman dressed in a plain black suit. She greeted Damien with a perfunctory handshake and gestured for him to follow her.

Her cold shoulder was perfectly fine with him. Despite all the effort that had gone into this trip, they hadn’t had the time or luck to acquire a civilian helicopter for the visit. The Phantom V was a stealthy, capable craft - but it couldn’t disguise that it was an attack aircraft to anyone actually
looking
at the thing.

The coordinator’s perfunctory greetings meant she didn’t have the time to realize what the vehicle he’d arrived on was before leading him into the massive marble dome. A massive pair of security hatches slid aside at a handprint from the woman, and he was inside.

He tried not to inhale obviously as the wave of power hit him. Very few people, even among Mages, could sense the surrounding energy the way he could. Even among those Mages, only Rune Wrights like himself and the Mage-King could read the runes around him at a glance.

The flow of energy around him was all directed towards one place. The suited woman led the way deep into the maze of layers, past a small set of offices and through several more security doors.

Finally, the last security door opened into the polished black innermost hemisphere. Silver runes glittered across the onyx room, all of them slowly spiraling into a single black plinth at the exact center of the hemisphere.

Another suited woman, this one wearing the gold medallion of a Mage, was standing next to the plinth, waiting for any inbound communication. At the sight of Damien and the RTA coordinator, she nodded slightly and stepped past them, heading for the office suite.

“My communication is confidential,” Damien told the coordinator. “I’m going to have to ask for privacy, and for the recording devices to be disabled.”

Normally, every sound in an RTA chamber was recorded, as the same chamber that transmitted also received. The Mage who’d been in the room when they arrived would have responded to any unscheduled communication and the recordings would have been forwarded to those who needed to know.

“With the planetwide security situation, we’re under orders from the Governor’s Office not to shut down the recording devices, sir,” the coordinator told him, the first words she’d said to him since his arrival.

“I was not informed of this when I booked my window,” Damien told her, doing his best to imitate the coldly arrogant tones and posture of a senior corporate executive. “My information is time-sensitive and must be transmitted to my head office tonight. I am not prepared to have it recorded for the paranoia of a backwater governor who can’t deal with some raggedy-assed terrorists.”

“You are welcome to reschedule your window,” the coordinator told him. “I don’t know when the restrictions on recordings will be lifted, though.”

Despite the prissy, bored, tone of her voice as she rejected his request, she stretched out her hand to him, palm open in a universal gesture.

With a sigh, Damien dropped a credit chip - one of several anonymized chips he’d carried to Ardennes in various denominations - into her hand. He’d expected to have to bribe his way in, and the amount on the chip was likely several months salary for the woman.

She glanced at it, checking the number on her PC, then tapped a command on the computer.

“Recorders are off,” she told him in the same prissy, bored tone. “No-one is scheduled to be in until morning. Let Mage Trudeau know you’re done when you leave.”

Damien waited patiently while the woman left, looking around to try to identify the recorders she’d disabled. Thanks to a briefing from the Protectorate Secret Service, intended for
exactly
this circumstance, he quickly identified all twelve of the microphones. With a tiny burst of magic, he burned them all out.

Since they were turned off, it would take a while for anyone to notice - and tonight, he needed to be sure.

With a deep breath he stepped forward to the plinth and removed his elbow-length gloves. Laying his bare hands on the plinth, he channeled energy through the runes in his skin and into the massive assemblage of runes and power around him.

The Array didn’t know where to send the energy, but
he
did. He’d checked the calculations again on the helicopter flight and knew exactly where to send it. The catchment area of a Runic Transceiver Array wasn’t much smaller than the planet it was built on, but from thirty-some light years away even that was a tiny target.

He hit it perfectly.

“This is an Alpha One Priority Communication,” he said aloud, the magic whisking his words across the light years. “Authentication Lima Victor Romeo Seven Seven Sierra Six Five Romeo Alpha Lima. I repeat, this is an Alpha One Priority Communication.”

He took a breath.

“I need to speak to Desmond Alexander immediately.”

The tiny room was silent for a moment, and then a sleepy voice suddenly echoed into it.

“This is Mars RTA Control, we are receiving you,” the Mage on the other end told him. “It’s past midnight here, we’re not waking the Mage-King up. We’ll record your message and have it added to his morning queue.”

“What part of Alpha One Priority did you not get?” Damien demanded. “Confirm the authentication.”

“We authenticated the code, we’ll have it added to his priority queue. Please transmit for recording.”

Damien paused, taking a deep breath as he considered the relatively quiet life of the bureaucratic Mage on the other end, and then ran out of patience.

“This is Envoy Damien Montgomery, and you have confirmed this is an authenticated Alpha One request,” he said harshly. “Every second this channel is open risks being bought with blood. Unless that is a bill you wish me to levy on
you
when I return, I suggest you wake Desmond Alexander the fuck up.”

A long moment of silence followed.

“My apologies, Envoy,” the voice, no longer sleepy, finally answered. “I will contact the King’s staff immediately, please hold the channel.”

#

With the Freedom Wing fighters scattered throughout the Bastille, opening cells and rescuing their friends, the command center rapidly got very quiet around Amiri. Two of the rebels had stayed to keep an eye on their Scorpion prisoners, but for some reason no-one in the room seemed inclined to strike up a conversation.

The controls for the various screens and systems of the fortress prison were hardly intuitive, but she’d at least managed to access the facility’s radar and automatic warbook and throw up the approaching air transports on a large screen.

The Bastille’s new ‘defenders’ had gone to full stealth mode on the Phantom V’s, leaving plain transport helicopters the only aircraft on the scanners. Twenty of the big aircraft had lifted off from Nouveaux Versailles Central District and headed her way.

That meant roughly four hundred soldiers. While that was a
lot
more people than she had in the fortress, she trusted Brute to even the odds.

She was starting to wonder where the
Scorpions’
escorts were when the screen suddenly flashed up new threat warnings. High-powered radar sweeps hammered across the sky as six jet fighters came dropping in from high altitude at Mach Two.

In theory, the radar sweeps from the jet fighters’ high-powered arrays should have picked up even stealthed craft. In practice, the Phantom Vs were almost forty years newer than the fighters available to the Ardennes Special Security Service.

Amiri wasn’t sure what the detection threshold for the Phantoms was, but they weren’t showing up on the Bastille’s huge radar dishes. There was no way the jet fighters saw anything.

That is, until Brute’s team opened fire. Each of the five gunships fired a pair of anti-radiation missiles, blasting high into the air towards the jet fighters.

The Scorpion aircraft went into evasive maneuvers - but kept their radars on, trying desperately to locate the Freedom Wing helicopters. It was exactly the wrong thing to do, as the ARMs homed in on the radar emissions with deadly precision.

Sixty seconds after the jet fighters fired up their radar, they were descending fireballs, leaving the transport helicopters wide open to Brute’s squadron.

The
smart
pilots realized it. The neat formation of transports came apart into swirling chaos - some pilots diving for the ground, others turning to run.

Six of the transport helicopters kept grimly on. A hundred and twenty Scorpions died moments later as heat-seeking missiles flashed through the air, scattering the aircraft and their passengers across the sky.

It took Amiri a moment to understand what she was seeing on the radar after that. Then she pulled up the view from a camera on top of the fortress.

White specks were beginning to fill the sky under the transports. Troops, crew and pilots recognized the futility of trying to take on the deadly aircraft Legatus had given the rebels and bailed out.

Her sensors didn’t have enough resolution to say how many
people
escaped. From how long it took Brute’s team to destroy the remaining helicopters, it looked like he gave those bailing out the time to do so; it was likely more of the troops escaped than she thought.

Not one of the helicopters survived to land or flee.

#

Mage-Commodore Adrianna Cor watched the destruction of the assault force in a state of not quite shock. The jet fighters had taken the exactly correct approach to knowing the enemy had stealth craft, and all it had done was seal their fates.

That was
military
technology -
real
military, not Ardennes’ glorified backwater militia. Martian Marines could duplicate the stunt the rebels had just pulled, but a ragtag bunch of revolutionaries
shouldn’t have
that tech.

“Any ID on those aircraft?” she demanded of her CIC staff.

“Nothing yet,” the Mage-Commander running the shift reported. “But from the quality of the stealth tech… they’re Core World-built. Probably either ours or Legatan.”

“Could
we
detect them?”

“Not from space,” the officer admitted. “But our assault shuttles should be able to from atmosphere.”

Cor considered for a moment, glancing at the communications station. Even regardless of their unofficial agreements, this was a situation where the Governor could request the Navy’s aid. She wouldn’t normally
offer
it, but…

“Have Major Morales prepare three assault shuttles for a combat landing,” she instructed. “Get me an ETA as soon as you can.” She couldn’t trust the Marines for
everything
, even if Corral and the other officers were mostly on side. He would know to send the… less reliable units for this. Those losses would be less inconvenient than others.