“If you don’t have evidence, manufacture it,” the Governor of Ardennes ordered. “And then lock up their whole ‘Annual Convention’.”
#
Chapter 19
Hauling an unconscious man into a hotel gave Amiri a strong sense of déjà vu. From the quirk on his lips, Riordan was drawing the same connection as he and a hotel staff member held a side door open for her.
“Where are we?” she asked as they proceeded as delicately as possible down a staff corridor.
“High Ardennes,” he told her. “Second-best mountain resort town on the planet, closest ski resort to Nouveaux Versailles.”
“Ah,” Amiri acknowledged, though she guessed it didn’t really matter. “Own this hotel too?” she asked.
“Like the car it’s buried under a bunch of shell corps, but yeah,” Riordan admitted. “Old Man Riordan built quite the hospitality empire, but didn’t want anyone to know he was rich. Strange old bastard, he was.”
The staff member led them into a public corridor, then swiped them into a room.
“Best ground floor suite, sir,” the suited clerk told Riordan. “We’ll cycle the booking, make it look like you aren’t here.”
“Thank you, Hedley,” Riordan told the young man.
While Riordan was playing ‘good manager’, Amiri promptly charged into the ‘room’. Suite was a more accurate descriptor as the ‘room’ had two separate bedrooms off a central seating area.
“Best suite indeed,” she muttered, carrying Montgomery into one of the rooms and dumping the bloodied Envoy on the expensive duvet.
“Second best hotel in town,” Riordan told her, dumping his coat and following her into the suite. “Dad made a point of never owning the best – attracted too much attention.”
Ignoring the rebel’s reminisces about his father, Amiri began quickly checking Montgomery over.
“He’s been hurt pretty bad,” she said quietly. “Lots of minor trauma, at least one blunt impact to the head.”
“They shot his shuttle down, Julia,” Riordan replied, suddenly serious. Weird – she hadn’t thought hearing the Freedom Wing speaker use her real name would have given her shivers.
“He’s lucky to be alive,” he continued. “He should be going straight to a hospital.”
“And what would happen to him there, Mikael?” Amiri demanded.
Riordan straightened and shook his head.
“Nothing good,” he admitted. “I’m assuming you have first aid training of some kind, but this is beyond a first aid kit and good intentions. We need a doctor.”
“It’s your hotel!” she snapped. “Find us one.”
A sigh and a shake of a head transmuted into a roguish smile.
“It is my hotel,” he murmured. “I can’t be found anymore than he can,” he continued, gesturing towards Montgomery on the bed, “but I have people here. I’ll see what I can do,” he promised, glancing down at the very small man on the bed.
“Keep him alive until I get back,” he asked, then left the room to find help.
Amiri watched him go, then turned her attention back to Montgomery. At this point, her first duty as a Protectorate Secret Service Agent was to make sure he stayed alive.
She slowly and carefully peeled off the shredded remnants of his suit jacket, wincing as she realized that his rough bandages were coming off with the clothes and leaving raw skin behind. Slowly, grateful that the young man was unconscious, she got his shirt and blazer off and looked at him.
It took Amiri a moment to even process his injuries once she got a good look at his torso. Alaura had once shown the ex-bounty hunter the strange swirling runic inlay that ran up her arm, a rune carved by the Mage-King himself that increased the Hand’s power tenfold.
Montgomery’s entire torso was covered. From the standard Jump Mage runes inlaid into his palms to what looked like two separate runes covering his chest, swirling characters of silver polymer had been carved into his skin in patterns that tried to shed the eye. The runes covered both of his arms, wrapping onto his torso and looping around his chest and back.
Between, over, and around the runes were the inevitable bruises and scrapes of surviving a crash. He’d roughly bandaged the one really bad gouge across his ribs, and she carefully replaced the bandage with clean gauze and tape from the hotel room kit.
With his wounds at least somewhat bound, she tucked a sheet over the Envoy. He wasn’t as young as he looked, she knew – short as he was, it was easy to forget that Montgomery was almost thirty, and only five years younger than her.
His clothes were going to need to be destroyed, and she started going through his pockets to make sure they kept anything of value. The Warrant had somehow survived undamaged, its traditional parchment crinkled but untorn. As she removed it from the blazer, she felt a hard lump she wasn’t expecting to find.
The pockets had been shredded, so it took only a moment to extract the object from the jacket and let it fall into her hand.
It lay there, unresponsive and impossible.
Montgomery was an Envoy, not a Hand. Amiri had been fully briefed on the young man accompanying Alaura to Ardennes. If he’d been a Hand, Alaura would have told her.
Yet the icon she held in her fist was a Hand’s symbol of authority.
“When you wake up, I have a lot of questions,” she told the unconscious man.
But she’d need them answered before she let Riordan know there was anything to question. Tucking the Warrant and Montgomery’s wallet into a folio she found in the closet, she slid the Hand into her own pocket.
Part of the job of the Secret Service, after all, was to keep the Mage-King’s secrets.
#
When Riordan finally logged back into the net, Lori was furious with him.
“Where the hell did you go, Lambda?” she demanded. “We’re in the middle of organizing an evacuation, and the man who arranged half our safe-houses ups and disappears! Where are you?”
“Breathe, Alpha,” her wayward cell leader told her. “You have a list of most of the safe-houses for a reason. But I was given what I thought was an opportunity to change everything – I had to take it, Alpha. Even if I was wrong, I judged it worth the risk.”
“I’m in High Ardennes now,” he continued. “And I need your help.”
Lori blinked. When he’d gone dark earlier in the day, Riordan had been in Nouveaux Versailles. Now he was in the same town as her – and he was one of the people who knew where she was.
She touched a command on the military encryption coms, opening a direct channel to Lambda and activating a different encryption algorithm.
“What’s going on, Mikael?” she asked quietly.
“Envoy Montgomery survived his shuttle crash,” Riordan told her. “I’ve got him and a Protectorate Secret Service agent holed up in the Silver Lion Hotel, but the Envoy is hurt – flesh wounds and a concussion that I can identify, but I’m no doctor and I don’t know what I can’t see!”
Lori was stunned into silence.
He was right – this could change everything. If they managed to get the Envoy on their side, then when the next wave of the Mage-King’s servants arrived with their righteous rage, Montgomery could direct them at the right target. Envoy Montgomery’s survival could end Vaughn’s entire scheme – his entire government.
“Damn,” she whispered.
“Yeah.”
“Can we trust him?”
“I don’t know,” Riordan admitted. “He passed out about when I arrived. The Secret Service agent though… she says they were planning on arresting Vaughn sooner or later. Only their uncertainty around the destruction of Karlsberg had protected him this long.”
“So he might work with us,” Lori said aloud.
“He’s an Envoy, Alpha,” Riordan reminded her. “Saving his life won’t hurt, but you need to remember – it’ll be us working with him, not the other way around. The man speaks for Mars.”
“I guess we’ll find out the hard way,
” she told him, making her decision. “Dr. Staite is in High Ardennes – he owes me some favors and he’s sympathetic to the cause. I’ll see if I can talk him into a house call.”
“I’ll keep my eyes open,” Riordan promised. “I’m linked back in for the evacuation, too. Even if this works out, we want our people buried deep. Envoy or no Envoy, right now Montgomery’s only resources are his own bare hands.”
#
With Dr. Staite on his way to the Silver Lion, Lori turned her attention back to co-ordinating the quiet dissolution of her rebellion into small and hideable components. The biggest problem, as Sierra had pointed out when they first realized how deep a hole they’d been dropped in, were the airbases.
It had taken a lot of effort, money, and favors to sneak in their two squadrons of Legatus-built stealth gunships. Even sitting in a bunker though, the aircraft required regular maintenance, which left the Freedom Wing running two complete airbases on opposite sides of the planet. They couldn’t fully shut those down, not without risking losing the gunships.
Thankfully, both of the airbases were literally bunkers – quietly blasted into mountains with expensive, radiation-blocking, shielded launch doors. Mage-Governor Vaughn had spent a lot of money over the years on his surveillance satellites, and the Wing had learned to stay hidden.
As she finished directing one of their direct action cells – high on the Scorpions’ list due to recent operations – to take shelter in the airbase on the south continent, an urgent alert light flashed up on her com. One of her cell leaders was requesting a private channel.
“Alpha,” she answered crisply.
“Boss, it’s Iota. You have a problem.” Iota was their source in the Ardennes Military – a mid-ranked officer who commanded the day shift on the busiest communication center on the planet.
“No shit,” she replied. “But I take it you mean a new problem.”
“They’re keeping mission specifics damn close to their chest, but a full battalion of Scorpions just rolled out High Ardennes-way,” Iota told her. “Mage-Colonel Travere has taken operational command, and brought his Enforcers with him.”
“Well, shit,” Lori repeated. Mage-Colonel Travere was the most senior of the handful of combat Mages in the Scorpions. He headed the glorified ‘platoon’ made up of the Enforcers who worked for Montoya. Perhaps thankfully, finding Mages sadistic enough to fulfill the kind of missions Vaughn and Montoya had for Scorpion Enforcers apparently wasn’t easy, but…
“How many is he bringing?” she asked. The Wing had Mages in its ranks, but none of the hundred or so Guild-trained combat Mages on Ardennes had joined them.
“They’re not saying,” Iota replied. “I did some digging, and it looks like he’s got his entire Bravo Squad. Ten Mages, plus Travere himself.”
“Any idea what they’re after up here?”
“They’re not saying on channels,” Iota told her. “I think they know whatever Hand replaces Stealey will crack open government communications like a rotten nut when they arrive. Scuttlebutt on the air is Travere’s orders were on paper.”
“I can tell you one thing, though,” he continued. “They didn’t borrow any gear from the Army. No heavy tanks, no exosuits, no anti-aircraft. All they rolled was APCs and light armor.”
Lori considered the resources they had at the airbase near High Ardennes and hidden in half a dozen warehouses around town. Even with just the personnel she had in town, she could guarantee that battalion would never come home. If she rolled the gunships and weapons hidden at the bunker in the mountains nearby, the Scorpions would never make it to High Ardennes at all.
Of course, at this point, that would kill everyone involved.
“They’re not after us,” she murmured. If nothing else, Montoya and Travere were smart enough to know they’d run into the gunships if they came after the Wing – and bring the AA units to deal with them.
“I don’t think so,” Iota confirmed. “But they’ll be running by you. Keep your head way down.”
“Merci, mes amis,” Lori told him. “We’ll be careful. Thank you.”
“Bonne chance, boss,” he replied.
Cutting the channel, Lori turned back to her immediate concern. Suddenly, concealing everyone in High Ardennes had moved up the priority list!
#
Chapter 20
Damien woke up out of a black fog for the second time in what he hoped was the same day. The feeling was familiar enough that he half-expected to find himself surrounded by a wrecked shuttle, which made no sense to him for several seconds.
Then his memory of the last few hours rushed back in, and his eyes snapped open and he tried to rise.
“Whoa there, sonny,” an unfamiliar voice told him. “Give a man a chance to see how well you’re ticking before you run off half-cocked!”
Blinking against the dim light, Damien slowly looked around. He had been stripped down to his underwear and lay on the bed in what looked like a hotel room. The bed was huge, but he’d been laid on one edge of it and a tall, heavyset, gray-haired man was standing over him.
The man wore a plain black suit and held a medical scanner.
“Who are you?” Damien coughed out. The last thing he remembered was a car pulling up behind him after he’d taken down one of the Scorpion gunships – a car with Amiri in it!
Glancing around again, he spotted the ex-bounty hunter. The tall, broad-shouldered woman stood just inside the door of the hotel room, her gaze flickering between whatever was outside the room and Damien himself.
“I am Doctor Adrian Staite,” the old man told him calmly. “Now, I understand you have had a difficult day. Please lie back down so I can finish examining you. It is important, young man.”
He met Amiri’s eyes. He hadn’t seen the woman in well over two years, but he knew she’d been working for Alaura. Presumably, she was the agent the Hand’s code had reached. Her timing, in that case, had been impeccable.
The ex-hunter nodded her head slightly. She, at least, thought the doctor could be trusted.
“Can someone brief me?” he asked as he lay back.
“Once I’m done, no earlier,” Staite said bluntly. “You’ll do none of us any good if that head wound is worse than it looks, will you?”
Sighing, Damien gestured for the doctor to continue. Staite proceeded to poke and prod, both with the oblong scanner he was holding and his hands and fingers. After several minutes of that, he flashed a light in Damien’s eyes that made the Envoy blink and recoil.
“Hrm,” he muttered aloud.
“I don’t think I’m dying, Doctor, so where am I at?” Damien demanded.
“You’re right, you’ll live,” Staite said dryly. “You’ll also be pleased to note that none of the abrasions or cuts you picked up have damaged the integrity of your runes – the polymer withstood the impact without damage.”
“It had better,” Damien muttered. The polymer was supposed to withstand anything an armored starship hull could withstand – it should take impacts better than his skin.
“You’d lost a lot of skin, and a good bit of blood despite your bandaging job,” the doctor continued. “I’ve sprayed down the worst injuries with plasti-skin and run a liter of blood into you while you were still asleep.”
He shrugged.
“Otherwise, you have a mild concussion,” he continued. “My recommendation is that you go back to sleep. I’ve a couple of medications that if you take and then sleep about eight hours, you’ll be back to a hundred percent.”
“Of course, if you let anything else smash you upside the head, it’ll be worse now,” he warned. “So, take the meds I’ll grab you, sleep till morning, and then be careful.”
Damien looked at the doctor levelly.
“I’ll try,” he promised.
“I’ve met your type, son,” Staite told him. “That’s the best I’m getting, isn’t it? I’ll grab those meds – don’t leave the bed.”
The doctor walked away from the side of the b
ed, but was swiftly replaced by Amiri.
“You heard all that,” Damien said.
“Yeah,” she replied. “Try not to die on me – we’ve still got a lot to do.”
“How bad?”
“Alaura’s dead,” Amiri said bluntly. Damien nodded – he’d been pretty sure of that. “Vaughn staged a fake ‘rebel’ attack on Government House. The entire delegation was wiped out. He’s also claiming sabotage took out the Tides of Justice.”
“No,” Damien said quietly. “That was Cor.”
“Mage-Commodore Cor?” Amiri demanded. She looked shocked. Apparently, neither she nor the rebels she’d made contact with had managed that connection yet.
“Cor took out Karlsberg,” Damien told her. “Harmon worked it out – it was a Navy orbital kinetic weapon. The Mage-Commodore has betrayed Mars.”
“That reduces our options a lot, Damien,” she said quietly. “I’d been writing her off anyway – clearly Vaughn had something over her – but I didn’t think she’d be actively against us.” She glanced back over her shoulder to be sure they were alone.
“I have escape plans in place, Montgomery,” she whispered. “I can get us both off-planet and en route back to Mars inside forty-eight hours.”
He shook his head, wincing against the pain.
“Not yet,” he whispered. “Not ruling it out, but not yet.” He glanced down at his undressed form. “Where is…?”
Staite returned as he was speaking, and he met Amiri’s eyes, hoping the woman could guess what he meant.
“Your Warrant is in the folio on the dresser over there,” Amiri told him, gesturing towards the dresser with her right hand. Her left hand, however, opened her jacket slightly, allowing him to see a handful of links of gold chain hanging over the edge of the inner pocket. She quickly scooped those back into the pocket, but he’d seen what he needed to.
She had the Hand, and had kept the rebels from knowing about it.
“So we’re on our own,” he finally said, considering what she’d said. “You have contacts?”
Hand of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 2) Page 14