Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars (34 page)

Damien had just finished ripping the doors off of the elevator shaft when his computer buzzed again.

“What is it?” he demanded harshly, looking at the wreckage of the building.

“It’s Zu,” the Ardennes Army General told him bluntly. “Are you okay?”

“I just killed thirty-four men for no reason other than that they were between me and Vaughn,” Damien replied. “No. What do you want?”

“Trying to help you,” Zu said. “Do you have
any
idea where you’re going?”

“I have the building schematics from my download,” Damien answered, glancing at the holographic display. “Command Center is buried beneath me, accessed via a secure elevator.”

A somewhat less secure elevator now.

“Right,” the General sighed. “You want the seventh level of the Center, third from the bottom. The elevator opens into a lobby, directly through that lobby is the main Operations Center. Vaughn has set up in an office just off the Center.”

“Thank you, General,” Damien said after taking a deep breath. “I apologize.”

“Don’t,” Zu said calmly. “I’d rather you be aware of who you kill. There are a lot of people in that Center.”

“The fewer of them who end up in my way, the more live,” the Hand replied bluntly. “Not having to search helps.”

“Good luck, My Lord Hand,” Zu finished after a long moment of silence.

Damien cut the channel and stepped into the elevator shaft.

One of the first things a Ship’s Mage learned was controlling gravity. In space, it allowed them to walk on ships lacking gravity runes or centrifugal gravity. On a planet, it allowed Damien to control his fall as he plummeted.

The ten floor Command Center was buried five hundred and twenty meters below the office building, and the elevator was locked at the very bottom as a security measure. Control of his speed and local gravity allowed Damien to plunge down the unlit elevator shaft fearlessly.

His personal computer’s holographic display was the only light as he dropped, a tiny icon showing how far he’d fallen down the half-kilometer shaft and how close he was to Level Seven.

With trained practice, he slowed his fall and brought himself to a halt outside the sealed doors for the floor Zu directed him to. The doors were heavily reinforced, a multi-layered steel and titanium barrier.

It took him slightly more than ten seconds to burn a man-sized hole through them and step into the underground nerve center of Ardennes planetary defense.

He’d been expecting guards. Soldiers, Enforcers, some kind of defense. Instead, the lobby was empty. A set of high security doors blocked further access into the facility, but they immediately yielded to the overrides in his Hand, allowing him to follow Zu’s direction.

When he reached the Operations Center, he knew something was wrong. The room was a series of concentric circles, each equipped with computer consoles and holographic displays. Communication channels linked out across the planet from here. This was the place from which Vaughn had run the planet since burning down his own palace.

It was empty.

There were a handful of doors leading from the room. Most were closed, but one was slightly ajar and Damien could see a light through it. Cautiously, carefully, he approached the door and threw it open.

“Ah, My Lord Hand,” the smooth tones of General Montoya greeted him. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

#

The scene inside the office was
nothing
like what Damien had been expecting. He’d expected to find and challenge Vaughn - known to be a powerful Mage, but no match for a Rune Wright with the Runes of Power in his skin.

He’d known General Montoya would likely be there, but the mundane soldier had barely registered in his plans.

Instead, Montoya stood on the opposite side of a mid-sized conference table.
Vaughn
lay crumpled against the wall, apparently having been shot in the stomach. The Mage-Governor appeared to be
breathing
, but not much else.

“Uh-uh,” Montoya told Damien as he took a step forward. The Scorpion General held up his arm, showing the holographic display of his personal computer. It was filled with seven flashing red buttons. Even from across the room, Damien could see they were names.

“Take another step forward, and I blow up a city,” Montoya said calmly. “Each step, I push a button. How many people are you willing to kill to reach me, My Lord Montgomery?”

“You know you can’t escape,” Damien told him quietly. “I can’t
permit
you to escape.”

“Do you really think Ardennes will thank you for overthrowing their tyrant if you kill half a dozen cities along the way?” the mad man on the other side of the room asked. “And it’s on a dead man’s switch, by the way,” he added as Damien shifted in place. “Kill me, and all seven bombs go off. Fifty million people or so. Do you really want to have that much blood on your hands?”

“What do you
want
?” Damien asked. He was playing for time, trying to see an option. It was possible Montoya was lying about the dead man’s switch - in which case, killing the man would save them. If not… even his orders to Jakab could still see the charges detonate.

“I want a shuttle and a fast ship,” Montoya told him calmly. He glanced over at Vaughn. “Oh, and a doctor on said ship for our dear Governor here. In the end, it seems he lacked the fortitude for what needed to be done. He’ll live, though. I’ll save him before his wounds get too bad,” he continued cheerfully. “That’s what friends are for, isn’t it?”

“I can’t let you or Vaughn walk,” the Hand told him quietly. “De-activate the detonators and hand over your PC, and I’ll guarantee your lives.”

As he spoke, he was tapping on his own PC behind his back, trying to feel his way through control menus by memory.

“I don’t think my friend here or I have any interest in being paraded through the streets of Olympus Mons for the edification of the common rabble,” Montoya snapped. “Keep your hands where I can see them,” he added, gesturing with the computer - now the deadliest weapon on the planet. “You’ve a reputation for trickery - one well deserved, I see. We didn’t even know you were a Hand.”

“That was your first mistake,” Damien told him, bringing his computer out in front. He’d apparently made it most of the way through the menus he was seeking, the ones only a Hand would have. It looked… possible.

“No, our mistake was killing Stealey rather than just running,” Montoya told him. “A Hand falls, another rises. I should have known one of you would have come out the woodwork. No more stalling! Either call a ship, or I start pushing buttons.”

The Scorpion’s finger drifted towards one of the holographic buttons, and Damien cursed.

“Fine!” he snapped. “I’ll have to call the Fleet, I don’t know what ships are in system.”

“Play nice now,” Montoya said mockingly, but gestured for Damien to proceed.

Before he could do
anything
, a third voice bellowed: “No!”

Both of them had forgotten about Vaughn. The extent of the Governor’s wounds were such that
any
exertion would likely be fatal - probably why he’d been lying quiescent against the wall. Faced with Montoya’s vicious threat
working
, the Mage-Governor acted anyway.

He lunged to his feet and across the room, a blade of force flashing from his hand to slash across Montoya’s upper arm. Blood spurted as the two friends stared at each other in shock, and then a second blade of force flashed out to remove Montoya’s head.

Even as the personal computer, still wrapped around half of Montoya’s arm, fell to the ground, Damien was back into his own computer, digging for the command he knew was there, hoping - praying - he found it before being severed from the body triggered whatever criteria the dead man’s switch needed.

The holographic screen started to flash - and then suddenly shut off as a Hand’s override hit the tiny computer and shut it completely down.

For a long, seemingly eternal, moment they waited. Nothing happened. No earthquakes from buried warheads. No disturbances. Not even dust from the ceiling.

Finally, Damien turned his attention back to the two men in the room with him. Montoya was dead. Vaughn had chopped his General and friend into several pieces.

Vaughn himself had collapsed back to the floor. Whatever rough first aid Montoya had done before Damien arrived had been ripped open, and blood was
pulsing
from the gut wound. He looked up at Damien, gritting his teeth against the pain.

“He was right,” Mage-Governor Michael Vaughn said harshly. “I have no interest in being paraded through the streets like a common criminal.” He coughed, spattering blood all over himself. “Don’t think you’re taking me alive.”

“It was never a priority,” Damien said calmly, looking down at the man who bent an entire world to his twisted will. “You’d done too much harm, even before you killed Stealey.”

Vaughn coughed up more blood. “You may judge me,” he said, his voice clogged, “but everything I did… I did for Ard…”

The Mage-Governor and Tyrant of Ardennes stopped in mid-sentence, doubling over with more coughing, more blood. He convulsed once, and then was still.

#

Walking back out into the Operations Center to get away from the blood, Damien tapped back into the communications network, linking himself to Zu, Armstrong, and Jakab.

“The detonator is disarmed,” he reported to them all. “Vaughn and Montoya are dead. What’s our status?”

“Most of the surface-to-space defenses are offline,” Armstrong told him. “The Wing is in control of most of Versailles, but we could use some help.”

“I have the Army evacuating most of the major cities other than Versailles,” Zu reported, “but there is unrest. No-one is sure what is happening, everyone is afraid.”

“We’ll be entering orbit in twenty minutes,” Jakab reported in turn. “I’ll have Marine boots on the ground shortly after that, but we won’t have many until Adamant gets here. That’ll be several hours, but she’s got two thousand Marines on that battleship.”

“Marines will help,” Zu confirmed. “Mars has removed their Governor, people will look to Mars for answers. It would perhaps be best if we… got ahead of the rumors.”

“What do you suggest?” Armstrong asked.

“From the Operations Center, Lord Montgomery can access the Governor’s emergency override channel,” the old General told them all. “That will allow him to speak to everyone. They need to see what has happened - they need to know a steady hand is at the tiller. The people of Ardennes need to see the Hand of Mars.”

Damien nodded, taking a deep breath as he glanced around the abandoned room.

“Let’s be about it.”

#

There was an austere beauty to Olympus Mons in winter.

Damien shivered under his heavy black coat as he and Amiri caught up to the funeral entourage making its way up the mountain. He hadn’t been sure they would make it on time, and he was reasonably sure Mage-Captain Jakab had pushed the course into Mars rather more than he should have.

This wasn’t a funeral he had wanted to miss.

Kiera, perhaps inevitably, spotted them first. The Princess of Mars, Second in line for the Throne under the Mountain, yanked on her father’s hand and pointed. Damien met his King’s eyes as Alexander glanced back and bowed his head.

Alexander acknowledged him with a nod, and then turned his head back forwards, saying something quiet to his daughter. Damien knew he and the Mage-King needed to talk, but now was not the time.

Above the tiny, barely thirty strong, procession spread the Fields of Sorrow. Marked on the edges by unmarked black basalt obelisks half-buried in the snow, the mass grave of the Eugenicists’ young victims stretched for kilometers upon kilometers. No-one knew how many bodies were buried there. No-one even knew their designations - for the children of the Olympus Project had never been given names. They were numberless, and nameless.

At the base of the Fields was a single low-slung structure carved of the same black basalt as the markers. The snow had been cleared from the front of the Black Mausoleum that morning, Damien presumed, but already several inches had gathered again.

Two hundred and fifty crypts had been built at the base of the Fields. The first men and women buried there were those who had died liberating the survivors of the Olympus Project. Since then, only a select handful of souls had ever been interred here.

Here lay the Mage-Kings.

Here lay their Hands.

At the front of the procession, Alaura Stealey’s two nieces, both in their mid-teens, stoically carried their aunt’s coffin. The entire crowd was silent as they followed, the only noise the crunching of feet on snow.

The two girls carried the coffin forward, past the first one hundred and sixty two crypts, each marked with a name etched forever into the basalt by magic.

Alaura was lucky in a strange way, Damien reflected as he walked past the graves of those who had worn the symbol he now bore. Of those hundred and sixty two crypts, only ninety-three actually contained bodies.

Hands did not always die in places or ways that allowed their family and their King to inter a body.

Finally, they reached the one hundred and sixty-third crypt. The slab of rock that would form its door was laid to the side, leaning against the wall of the Mausoleum. No name had yet been carved into the stone.

Silently, under the eyes of strangers they likely had never met - strangers who were the leaders of their government! - the two teenagers slid the coffin into the waiting crypt. If a tiny flash of magic helped catch a corner that slipped on chilled fingers, no-one present judged.

They stepped back. The Mage-King stepped forward, standing next to the black hole for a long moment, and then glanced back.

“Damien, I’m glad you could make it,” he said quietly, but loudly enough to be heard. “You were with her closest to the end. Will you help me?”

Swallowing, Damien walked forward. The tiny crowd parted for him and he could hear the murmuring. He wore the Hand openly on his chest - and spotted two others in the procession. He met the gaze of Desmond’s other Hands, and saw only support and sympathy there.

Somehow, that was enough.

He joined his King at the crypt of his teacher and met Alexander’s eyes.

“There isn’t much to it,” Alexander whispered. “Just follow my lead.”

Then the Mage-King raised his hand, and with a small flash of power, black basalt began to turn white. He started at the beginning of the name - Damien started at the end.

When they met in the middle, ‘Alaura Stealey’ was carved into the crypt. That was it. No dates of birth or death - the first few dozen burials here had been of men and women who didn’t
know
when they’d been born, and the tradition continued.

With her name forever marked for the world to see, Damien and Desmond each took ahold of part of the basalt plinth with their magic, lifting it gently into place to forever seal off Alaura Stealey from the world she had served.

#

Later, there was food and drink. Warships ran on Olympus Mons Time, so Damien had re-adjusted to the time of his home before arriving, but none of the food appealed to him. With a single glass of half-drunk wine, he propped up a smoothed stone wall and watched the quiet, low-key, party.

“I’m glad you made it back in time,” Desmond Alexander told him. Damien turned to find his King watching him, the older Mage’s eyes unreadable. “We had to wait for Alaura’s family to arrive, but we couldn’t hold off much longer.”

“I… wasn’t sure I should leave,” Damien admitted. “Watts seemed to have things in hand, but…” he shrugged. “Jakab is still in orbit, I should be able to return relatively quickly.”

“That won’t be necessary, Damien,” Alexander said dryly. “With Zu and Armstrong both on side with Watts, the situation seems well under control. You did good work. Better than I dared to hope for.”

“We came too close to disaster,” the Hand whispered.

“Get used to it,” his King advised. “You won’t often find situations that aren’t on the edge of disaster in my service. With the resources Watts has at his command now, you aren’t needed on Ardennes. You delivered him the planet with Vaughn removed and the civil war ended - what more did you think you needed to do?

“No,” the Mage-King of Mars said firmly, “your mission to Ardennes is complete. It was far more difficult than any of us expected, and you rose to the challenge with flying colors. You have earned that trinket.” He tapped the golden hand on Damien’s chest.

“Now,” he continued, “you will rest. In the morning, you will report to Doctor Andreas - he’s the Mountain’s new chief psychiatrist.

“Once Andreas has cleared you for duty, I have another mission for you,” Desmond Michael Alexander told his Hand softly. “You know the reward for a job well done, after all.”

#