Hand of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 2)

by Glynn Stewart

  “It looks like we were right,” he continued grimly, “except that the wanton terrorists work for the Governor.”

  #

  The sight of the red and black uniforms of the Scorpions waiting when Damien exited the shuttle sent a shiver down his spine. The Special Operations Directorate was a unique group with its own crimes, but he had to wonder about any organization that contained something like the SOD.

  For that matter, he had his suspicions about just how Vaughn had kept the peace as he quietly choked every last penny out of his planet – and the Ardennes Special Security Service was high on his mental list of suspects.

  A squad of the Scorpions were providing security for the pad Nouveaux Normandy Air Control had directed them to, and a trio of officers were waiting at the edge of the pad.

  The pad was still too hot for them to step onto, but Damien wasn’t feeling overly patient. Despite Mitchell’s uncomfortable look at Damien heading out of the shuttle, the shield he was holding protected him completely.

  He’d also extended it around the two Marines Sergeant Mitchell had sent out immediately after him, though their exosuit battle armor meant it was likely redundant.

  The expression of the lead Scorpion officer as Damien walked calmly across the still steaming concrete surface, accompanied by the two-meter-plus hulks containing his bodyguard, was worth every erg of energy the shield took to maintain.

  “My Lord Envoy,” the large black man, apparently unused to being the one intimidated, greeted Damien with a slow salute. “I am Major Ken Leblanc, commanding officer of the Thirty-Seventh Special Security Battalion.”

  “A pleasure, Major, though I’ll admit the circumstances could be better,” Damien told him, returning the salute. The 37th, according to his research, was one of the two Security Battalions actually housed in Nouveaux Normandy.

  Damien kept walking, forcing the Scorpion officer to fall in at his side. The two junior officers were brushed aside by the bulk of the exosuited Marines, falling in at the end of the little procession.

  “How can the Ardennes Special Security Service help you, My Lord?” Leblanc finally asked.

  “Two of the men who were with Hand Stealey survived, correct?” Damien replied, stepping out into the streets of the city and glancing around. Nouveaux Normandy’s nicer areas rivaled even Mars for glitz and glass, but he could see the concrete blocks of the apartments built for the Work Placement Program even from here.

  “That’s right,” Leblanc confirmed. “Lieutenant Avison and his squad were from my battalion.”

  “I’ll need to speak to those men, immediately if possible.”

  “They’re in protective custody,” Leblanc said slowly. “I’ll need to get confirma…”

  “No, you won’t,” Damien told him flatly. “I will speak to them. Now.”

  “I…” Leblanc trailed off as Damien turned to face him.

  There was no way the man had risen to the rank of Major without getting his hands dirty on this planet. Damien held that thought in his mind as he met the gaze of the much larger, more physically intimidating man, and removed his Warrant from his pocket.

  “Do you need to see my Warrant, Major?” he asked quietly. “Or do you accept my authority as your Governor has?”

  Leblanc finally shook his head.

  “No, My Lord Envoy,” he admitted. “We have a vehicle waiting for you, this way, sir.”

  #

  The armored limousine Leblanc provided was subtler than the armored personnel carriers they’d ferried Alaura around in. That subtlety was somewhat ruined by the pair of exosuited Marines jogging on either side of it.

  By the time they reached the Ardennes Special Security Service’s main Normandy base, Mitchell and his Marines had ‘borrowed’ the vehicle Leblanc’s security detail had arrived in and caught up to them. The big Major looked unimpressed when the transport truck pulled up and disgorged Marine black and gold uniforms, not Scorpion red and black ones.

  “Sergeant, have your men wait here and prep for an arrest,” Damien murmured. “Make sure that Colonel Brockson does not leave the base while I’m here.”

  “Of course, sir,” Mitchell agreed. “You are taking an escort in, correct?”

  “Not Braid and Coral,” the Envoy told him, glancing at those two worthies in their two meter suits of battle armor. “It would be a little much,” he finished dryly.

  “I’ll accompany you myself, My Lord,” Mitchell told him.

  “Just make sure about Brockson,” Damien ordered.

  The Sergeant nodded and gestured his two section leaders over to him.

  There were a few minutes of quiet muttering, while Leblanc was looking more and more uncomfortable, and then Mitchell and two Marines joined Damien.

  “Let’s go, Major,” Damien told Leblanc.

  “Your men will have to leave their weapons at the front security desk,” the Major said as they headed towards the entrance to one of the several mid-sized office buildings that anchored the Scorpion base.

  “No, they won’t,” Damien told him affably. “Please make sure of it before there are any misunderstandings.”

  The Major looked like he’d been chewing on lemons, but when they reached the security desk he bluntly ordered his people to issue Mitchell and his Marines passes for their weapons.

  “This way,” he said once they were through, and led the way down into the bowels of the building, finally passing through an – open – heavy security door into what was unquestionably a prison.

  “I thought they were in protective custody, not a dungeon,” Damien observed.

  “There is nowhere safer on the planet than down here, My Lord,” Leblanc replied. “I assure you, they are being made as comfortable as possible.”

  Finally reaching the section of the empty underground prison the two soldiers were in, Damien conceded at least that point. Someone had made an effort to re-calibrate the lights from their harsh institutional brightness to something more tolerable, and the rough prison cots had been replaced with comfortable looking beds and couches. Several cells, behind a secondary security door, had been converted into an apartment.

  That secondary security door was still sealed with both mechanical and electrical locks and guarded by four men in medium body armor.

  “The Envoy is here to speak with Riley and Pierre,” Leblanc told the men. “Open it up.”

  “Thank you, Major,” Damien said. “Now, once the door is open, my men will provide security until I’m done speaking with them. We will advise when I am done.”

  “That’s not…” Leblanc trailed off on his own accord this time. “As you command, My Lord Envoy.”

  “Thank you,” Damien told him quietly.

  With a small, somewhat pained looking, nod, Leblanc opened the door and led his men back down the corridor.

  “You have some kind of jammer for the bugs, Sergeant?” Damien asked quietly once Leblanc was far enough away.

  “Of course,” Mitchell replied.

  “Then let’s find out what Riley and Pierre have to say.”

  #

  Chapter 13

  With the asexualizing body armor off, Riley turned out to be a slender woman with dark, buzzed-short hair. Pierre, on the other hand, was a completely bald man barely an inch taller than Damien’s own five-foot-nothing.

  When Damien entered their ‘suite’, Riley was settled in watching something on a display screen, and Pierre was pacing the length of the cell block in a bounding, nervous pace.

  “Riley Beaumont and Pierre Winslow?” he asked softly, making sure they could both hear him. With Leblanc gone, and the necessity to maintain a facade gone with the Major, Damien allowed himself to relax. He did not need to intimidate these people.

  “Yeah,” Riley replied, glancing up at him. “Well, it looks like a suit, walks like a suit and quacks like a suit, so I’m guessing you’re from Mars?”

  Damien was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to have heard the muffled chuckle from
the Marines behind him, but he was also glad to see the pair still had spirit. Leaving her comment hanging for a moment, he pulled up a chair and gestured for Pierre to sit.

  After a moment, the nervously pacing soldier did so, but continued to nervously fidget.

  “I am Envoy Damien Montgomery,” he told them. The title felt pretentious as hell to him still, but the pair needed to know how deep the waters they were swimming in were. “The rest of your squad died protecting Hand Stealey – that will not be forgotten.”

  “Vaughn will wave their bloody shirts all over the place, that’s for sure,” Riley said bluntly. “Every ounce of mileage he can get from Mars out of Avison’s body is profit to him, I’m sure.”

  “Beaumont!” Pierre snapped, the soldier’s face worried.

  “Before we continue,” Damien interrupted before the Scorpion could continue, “I should probably mention that that I am recording this conversation. And, thanks to the wonderfully complex toys of the Royal Martian Marine Corps, I can guarantee that nobody else is.”

  Pierre’s fidgeting stopped. Riley’s lackadaisical, somewhat lazy, pose vanished into an instant sitting form of attention. Unlike the moment before, Damien had no problems believing the pair were real soldiers now.

  “Playing the real game now are we?” Pierre asked. “You might get us in deep shit, even covering us like that you know.”

  “You fought and your friends died to protect Hand Stealey,” Damien reminded them. “Olympus Mons does not forget its debts. You need protection? Money? A ticket offworld? Name it.”

  The room was silent for ten seconds. Twenty.

  “You’re serious,” Riley finally said into the quiet.

  “I am the Voice of the Mage-King of Mars,” Damien Montgomery told them, the words falling like tombstones in the quiet underground cell. “My word binds Olympus Mons. And I need to know who tried to kill Alaura Stealey.”

  Pierre sighed, leaning back in his chair.

  “We don’t know anything,” he replied. He held up a hand when Damien was about to reply, and repeated himself. “We don’t know anything.

  “But we can guess, and we can draw conclusions,” he continued. “Look, people don’t call us Scorpions because it’s a really cool badge. They call us Scorpions because we’re nasty, we’re sneaky, and we stab folk when they’re not looking.”

  He gestured at Riley. “Beaumont here? She’s squeaky-clean, three months out of school and assigned to Avison’s squad. Me? Not so much,” he admitted, meeting Damien’s gaze. “Avison was like her. Ten months out of the Academy, idealistic as hell. I think Leblanc was trying to shield him from some of the harsher realities, but I also think it meant someone marked him as expendable.

  “As someone who’d look good dying for the Hand,” he concluded bluntly. “The rest of us? Just collateral damage – like the fucking kids.

  “I can’t say anything for sure – like I said, we don’t know shit,” Pierre repeated quietly. “But they didn’t throw us down here until after we’d been interviewed by Colonel Brockson.”

  “Special Operations Directorate,” Damien said quietly. He left the words hanging in the air, but both Pierre and Riley nodded fiercely.

  “Scary fucker,” Riley observed. “I swear he was trying to make sure we couldn’t identify anything – but hell, the only thing I can say for sure is that those were our guns.”

  “Our guns?”

  “The rocket launchers,” she said grimly. “I picked up the signature pattern on my scanners – Martian Ironworks Arms Shrike Five Anti-Armor rockets. Ardennes Army doesn’t have ‘em – they use the Seven, it’s got a rotary magazine. Only force on the planet with the Shrike Five is the Scorpions.”

  “Soon as he was done interviewing us, Brockson said we were in protective custody and threw us down here,” Pierre told Damien with a shrug. “Don’t know if it was Riley mentioning the Shrikes, or just wanting to be sure we didn’t say anything to the wrong people, but they locked us up good.”

  “You want out?” Damien asked.

  “Hell yeah,” Riley snapped. “I’ll take that ticket offworld, too. Yesterday.”

  Pierre took a second to think about it, but nodded slowly.

  “Yeah, I’m with Beaumont,” he said quietly. “I hear Martian summers are ten months long. I’d like to find out.”

  Damien stood and gestured for them to follow him.

  “I still have business here,” he admitted, “but I’ll make sure you’re spaceport-bound first, I think. You’ve been more helpful than you suspect.”

  #

  On his way to Brockson’s office, Damien began to have an inkling of why the Mage-King selected his Hands with such care. Having been connected to the chip inside the golden amulet, his personal computer was now capable of locating Colonel Elijah Brockson’s personal computer in the military facility.

  Personal computers included everything from birth certificates to bank account details and were among the most heavily encrypted civilian electronics in the Protectorate. Accessing one without permission was legally a form of assault, and government access to a PC required a warrant.

  As a Hand, Alaura’s word counted as a legal warrant. To enable that, the Hand itself was loaded with the encryption keys to override the security on most PCs. Combining the Hand with Alaura’s orders, Damien effectively had a blank warrant to lay open many of the deepest secrets of those around him.

  The three years of training and a planned year-long apprenticeship – all of which followed doing something spectacular enough to attract Desmond’s attention – seemed a frail shield against that much authority and power.

  “You’ll want to lock his PC,” Mitchell told him quietly as they exited the stairs onto the seventh level of the office tower. No-one had challenged them since they’d left the dungeons. Damien had sent the two junior Marines – with an order signed in his Voice – to take Riley and Pierre to the spaceport, leaving only the Sergeant guarding him.

  “I can do that?” Damien asked.

  “Security lockdown,” Mitchell confirmed. “Theoretically, it’s a defense against theft, but that little gold toy of yours gives you the ability to lock it down remotely. If he’s busy, he might not even notice.”

  Brockson technically had a job to be doing in Normandy, and Damien doubted he would be interfacing his personal computer with the general base network to help do it. That PC likely contained enough evidence to allow Damien to ask some very pointed questions of the Governor.

  They paused outside the Special Operations Directorate Colonel’s office for a few minutes while Damien found the command he needed. Like all computer commands, it was perfectly innocuous looking. With a deep breath, Damien squared his shoulders and touched the key.

  He could not afford weakness now and, with a firm nod to Sergeant Mitchell, Envoy Damien Montgomery, Voice of the Mage-King of Mars, entered the office.

  #

  Colonel Brockson clearly hadn’t expected to be interrupted. He looked up from the desk screen he was working on in annoyance, glaring at the intruders into the plain, completely undecorated, office he’d apparently inherited.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he snapped. “This is a private office.”

  “Colonel Elijah Brockson?” Damien said.

  “What?” he demanded.

  “You are Colonel Elijah Brockson, Ardennes Special Security Service? Currently assigned as Logistics Coordinator, Nouveaux Normandy Province?”

  “I am. Now get out of my office before I call security,” Brockson snapped.

  “They wouldn’t obey your orders over mine, Colonel,” Damien told him. He wasn’t, he had to admit internally, entirely certain on that point. Legal authority didn’t always translate into actual power. “I am Envoy Damien Montgomery. I’m investigating the assassination attempt on Hand Stealey, and I have some questions.”

  Brockson stared at Damien in shock for a moment, almost immediately absorbed in a sharp laugh.

  “I guess I can
’t stop you if you’re really an Envoy, kid,” he replied. “Don’t know what you think I know about it!”

  Damien smiled thinly.

  “I have to admit,” he said genially, “I found it interesting that you left Nouveaux Versailles, what, ninety minutes after the Hand informed the Governor’s people she was coming here? Now, if that had been a previously booked flight, I might have understood it, but you had to have a military flight held for you and your cargo.”

  “I take it you’ve never been military?” Brockson told him. “Hurry up and wait – or in this case, wait for the cargo, then hurry up.”

  “Indeed,” Damien allowed. “What happened to your cargo, though, Colonel? You loaded eight crates – cargo labeled as explosive, but locked under a Special Operations Directorate seal – onto that transport plane. No such crates have been checked in at either base in this city.”

  This time, Brockson was definitely caught off-guard. He took a moment to answer, and spoke slowly when he did.

  “I’m afraid you must be mistaken, Envoy,” he told Damien. “I don’t know what the Special Operations Directorate is, and I checked my cargo in when I arrived – but given that it was mostly paper notebooks and new data chips, I doubt it stood out to whatever search you did.”

  “That’s funny,” Damien told him softly. “Your file has you assigned as the commanding officer of the Special Operations Directorate, so I’m very sure you know exactly what it is. Would you care to elaborate?”

  “I’m sorry, I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” Brockson said finally. “For that matter, accessing my file is a violation of my rights. I will have to raise this with the JAG.”

  “Colonel, I speak for the Mage-King of Mars,” Damien reminded him. “If you’ve lost track, he is your ultimate boss. I have full authority to access your file. Full authority to override the Governor’s seal on said file.