Hand of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 2)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Let me know,” she said shortly. She’d spotted a rock outcrop rising out of the snow earlier, and that was her new destination. Hopefully the snow would hold her weight until she got there…

  #

  The wind whipping across the face of the mountain made the climb bitterly cold. Damien had scoffed at the number of layers that Riordan had acquired from the sporting goods store, but now he was glad for every scrap of fabric wrapped around his all-too-vulnerable skin.

  “Why are these lines even here?” he asked the Ardennes native as he pulled himself up the cable. The pair, neither very experienced with climbing, had attached harnesses and automatic ascenders to heavy metal cables fixed into the mountain, running from the cliff at the back of the Sunshine resort to a winding mountain road two hundred meters below.

  Two thirds of the way up said lines, the sheer icy face of the cliff was making Damien uncomfortable. They’d pulled the cables out of the snow, but even through his gloves the twisted metal fiber felt brittle.

  “During the summer, idiot tourists – and local teenagers! – rappel down the side of the mountain, and then use ascenders like these to get back up,” Riordan replied. “Since it’s unhealthy for the rock to keep hammering in new pitons, they installed fixed heavy cables lines a decade ago. The cables tend to be replaced annually though.”

  “In spring, I’m guessing,” the Envoy replied dryly.

  “Yeah,” Riordan replied. “I’ve done the climb before,” he continued. “I don’t remember it sucking quite this much.”

  As if to drive home his point, a sharp gust of wind sent the rebel skittering across the icy surface, holding tight to the cable as he slid uncontrollably.

  Damien took a sharp breath and pulled himself up the cable, holding himself above the ascender with a tight grip on the freezing metal. A moment later, Riordan slid across the ice beneath him, missing him by a handful of centimeters.

  He thought that was the end of it and began to sigh in relief as Riordan’s slippery trip began to slow.

  Then Damien realized that the two cables had become wrapped around each other above his head. The pulling on his line brought his attention to the crossed metal fibers above him – just in time to see Riordan’s cable, brittle from the winter cold and stressed beyond its design, shatter from the friction.

  The end flashed past his eyes, and he saw the other man begin to fall.

  Clever plans fled Damien’s mind. Hanging onto the cable with his left hand, he pushed himself away from the cliff face and flung out his right hand. Fire flashed into existence around the runes in his flesh, incinerating the layers of fabric around his hand as he reached out with his magic.

  Lines of force wrapped themselves softly around Riordan, gently slowing his fall. Once the rebel’s fall had been arrested, Damien gestured upwards. His magic propelled the older, heavier man up the mountain faster than any powered ascender could have lifted him.

  Moments after settling Riordan on the edge of the cliff, Damien unclipped his own ascender and rose on a gentle elevator of his own power. Settling onto the frozen ground next to Riordan, he looked down at the shaky Freedom Wing demagogue.

  “You okay?”

  “Why wasn’t, that the, plan from the beginning?” Riordan demanded, the words coming in spurts as he gasped for breath.

  “Because if Travere and his Enforcers are paying any attention, I just rang the biggest doorbell in four or five kilometers,” Damien told him.

  “Oh. Shit.”

  “Yeah.” Damien turned his gaze on the resort complex. The cliff was beneath a small dip, and it appeared that their impromptu arrival hadn’t attracted conventional attention at least.

  “Amiri,” he tapped the communicator. “Any idea where they’re holding the Greens?”

  “I’m showing two concentrations of thermal signatures,” the Secret Service agent told him. “A big one, looks like two or three hundred people in what I think is the big conference hall. Then there’s about thirty or forty people in the restaurant – on your end. The rest are in pockets, look like wandering guards and search parties tearing the place apart.”

  Damien glanced over at Riordan. “Your guess?” he asked the rebel. “You know the players better than us.”

  “I don’t think even Travere is planning on mass murdering the guests,” Riordan said quietly. “I’m guessing the forty in the restaurant are our people.”

  “All right.” Damien glanced across the resort again. While the armored vehicles were forming a blockade across the entrance, the heavy trucks that had transported most of the Scorpions had been parked in an impromptu motor pool closer to the building. Unless he was mistaken, each of the transport vehicles should easily carry thirty or so politicians, staffers, and family members.

  “We need one of those trucks,” he told Riordan. “Think you can grab one? When we blow the charges, pull it over to the main entrance and be ready to pick everyone up.”

  “Wait, you’re going in alone?” the rebel demanded.

  Damien smiled sadly.

  “Mikael,” he said gently. “You’re no soldier. No spy. No Mage. You’ll just slow me down. And,” he saw the side door closest to them open up, “I think our doorbell ringing got noticed. Get the truck.”

  Leaving Riordan in the dip, trusting in the man to go collect the truck, Damien emerged from its shelter and headed towards the door.

  A single man stepped out of the hotel. He was in the Scorpions’ winter uniform, a heavy black and red affair that stood out against the snow like an old bloodstain, with the gold medallion of a Mage at his throat.

  For a moment, the sight of the medallion, uniform, and body armor of a fully trained Mage Enforcer half-stopped Damien in his tracks. Enforcers were only a half-step below the combat Mages trained by the Martian Marine Corps, trained by the Guild to be elite mercenaries, bodyguards – and to serve in planetary armies. They were so far beyond the Mage he’d been before going to Mars that a single Enforcer could have easily overcome that young Mage and all his friends.

  Damien was no longer that young Mage.

  “Hey,” he hailed the Scorpion. “I need a hand here – I got lost on a ski trip and just made my way back. It’s fucking cold out there!”

  The story was atrocious, rendered even less believable by the fact that the hiking trails came down in a completely different part of the resort. But it got him closer – much closer.

  Then the Enforcer, already looking confused by Damien’s story, spotted his right hand – where the glove had been burnt away by a burst of magic to expose the silver polymer rune inlay below.

  To Damien’s eyes, the man suddenly lit up with an aura as he channeled power, the energy flickering down his arm to the runes on his own palms.

  After three years of training under the Mage-King, Damien didn’t need to gather power. As soon as the Mage began to act, his runes flared with warmth and electricity flashed from his exposed hand. The sparks slammed full-force into the Enforcer, flinging the man backwards even as fire flashed away from his own hands.

  Snow melted where the Scorpion’s fireball had landed, but the man lay slumped against the door, twitching as electricity surged through his body. By the time Damien reached him, the Enforcer was unconscious. A faint and ragged, but still present, pulse responded to Damien’s touch, and then the Envoy dragged the other Mage into the hotel.

  He hadn’t thought about using a non-lethal level of force – he’d just defaulted to it. Nonetheless, since the man was still alive, Damien couldn’t leave him in the cold to freeze to death!

  #

  No-one building a civilian resort deep in the mountains had put any thought into trying to shield the building from military-grade passive sensors. While the insulation built into any structure this high in the mountains limited the use of infrared, combining the fuzzy blobs of concentrations of people with the scanners picking up radio leakage gave Amiri a near-godlike view of Sunshine.

  “Damien, you’ve got new
movement heading your way,” she told the Envoy. “Looks like you attracted attention.”

  “Damn,” he replied. “All right, we needed them elsewhere anyway. Blow the charges.”

  “How exactly are you getting those people out if we block the only road?” she asked. Somehow, in all of their planning, the young Mage hadn’t mentioned that part.

  “Trust me,” he told her. “And trust me that we don’t have time,” he continued grimly. “Blow the charges now, Amiri.”

  She knew that tone. Alaura had practiced the same one – it apparently came standard issue with the golden amulet.

  Shifting to make sure she could see what happened through the scope of the laser, she triggered the command she’d programmed into her personal computer. For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then a burst of smoke erupted from halfway down the slope. The soldiers on the APCs were observant – they noticed it and immediately dropped into their vehicles, battening hatches against an attack.

  The first explosion did nothing visible. Neither did the second. By the third, though, the entire mountain was rumbling.

  The fourth and fifth blew massive chunks of ice into the air, slamming into the ground and setting entire snowfields into motion. The sixth explosion directed the motion, moving it into the channels weakened by the first three.

  Snow rippled down the mountain, carving a path towards the APCs in a tidal wave of snow and ice. It hammered down on the armored vehicles, their hatches shielding them against the elements.

  Then the seventh and eighth charges blew. The last pair didn’t release snow. Carefully positioned on a cliff her sensors had told her was more fragile than it looked, the last pair blasted a thousand tons of mountain rock free – and sent it careening down the path the snow had just carved.

  Tanks and APCs half-buried by the snow couldn’t dodge and were crushed as multi-ton fragments of rock crashed into them. Several of the out-buildings were ripped apart by the avalanche she’d unleashed, and only the careful design of the landscaping in the resort’s valley directed the debris away from the hotel itself.

  The third avalanche wasn’t triggered by any of her charges. It came from even higher up the mountain, rock and snow triggered by the earlier avalanches that came sweeping down on Amiri’s sheltering rock outcropping.

  Her sensors gave her mere moments’ warning – enough to dive into cover, abandoning her scanners but hauling her gun with her.

  The rock outcropping wasn’t much – but it was, hopefully, enough to shield her as the mountain loosed its wrath on the humans who’d dared to use it as a weapon.

  #

  It was impossible to miss that the charges had succeeded. The entire hotel building shook as the mountain came down around them, and the lights flickered around Damien as the building switched over to emergency power.

  The shaking continued for longer than he’d been expecting, and he was starting to worry for the structural integrity of the building as pictures shook themselves off the wall nearby and light fixtures swung themselves into walls and shattered.

  Finally, silence returned, and he touched his communicator.

  “Amiri, are those troops moving away now?” he asked.

  There was no response.

  “Amiri?” he repeated. Only silence responded, and Damien swore. Whatever had happened to the Agent, he couldn’t do anything about it – he had a building full of civilians to rescue. “Riordan, what are you seeing?” he demanded.

  “The armor is gone, Montgomery,” the rebel replied. “Crushed – but the road’s gone with them. There’s troops moving in from everywhere to try and dig out survivors. Transports trucks are abandoned, grabbing one right now but I have no idea how we’re getting out of here.”

  “Leave that to me,” Damien told him. “Sounds like I’m clear. Hold tight on that truck till I call you.”

  “Roger.”

  It seemed that they’d succeeded in drawing most of the soldiers out of the hotel. Despite Amiri’s earlier warning, Damien saw no-one as he made his way through the battered hotel. Inside the building, it looked like an earthquake had struck – cracks had appeared in the walls, things had been knocked over or free.

  The emptiness made the back of his neck itch, and he found himself raising a defensive shield unthinkingly. It made him a little more visible to other Mages, but he left it up. Either Travere and his Mages were busy rescuing their friends, or he was going to need it.

  Tucking himself against a corner to stay out of sight of any remaining patrols in the building, Damien checked his location against a map of the building and Amiri’s description of the clusters of people. If he read the map correctly, he was a corner and twenty feet from the main restaurant and the smaller group of prisoners.

  Taking a deep breath, Damien stepped around that corner and walked calmly towards the glass doors of the entrance. Someone had activated the metal shutters used to lock the restaurant up at night, and then attached an emergency police lock to keep the shutters locked to the ground without the proper codes.

  It was a formidable obstacle to anyone without the codes, heavy welding equipment – or a Mage. There were no visible guards, the paramilitary soldiers most likely outside trying to dig their friends out of the avalanche.

  The lack of defenders in a building seized by Vaughn’s paramilitary troops was nerve-wracking, and it was almost a relief when the attack finally came.

  A bolt of fire flickered out from an alcove he’d missed, hammering into his shields from behind. The bubble Damien had wrapped around himself was a relatively weak defense, a roughly spherical force bubble that moved with him without too much thought.

  Relatively weak or not, it was designed to stop bullets and shed a mid-strength fireball with only a minor tremor of energy drain.

  Damien spun, dodging sideways as a second fireball splashed through where he’d stood a moment before. He flung out one hand, sending a blast of fire flashing back towards his assailants.

  He felt magic flare and his fire was knocked aside. Three men emerged from the shadows to face him, all in the heavy winter uniform of the Scorpions – and the man in the center wore the oak leaves and gold medallion of a Mage-Colonel.

  “I presumed someone would try and sneak in while we were distracted,” Mage-Colonel Travere said coldly. “I didn’t think the rebels even had decent Mages, but here you are. It’s a shame. Any Mage could do better than joining the rabble.”

  Damien smiled coldly and met the Mage-Colonel’s gaze.

  “My name,” he said quietly, “is Damien Montgomery, Envoy of the Mage-King of Mars. Your Governor is guilty of treason. Work with me, and no-one else needs to die today.”

  Travere jerked back as if physically struck, looking Damien over carefully.

  “You’re supposed to be dead,” he said conversationally. “Killed in a shuttle crash, shot down by the rebels. I guess,” he said in a blatantly fake sad voice, “I’ll have to fix that.

  “Because, you see,” he continued, his voice hardening, “several hundred of my men are buried under your avalanche, and likely dead. So no matter what you say, I think someone does still need to die today.”

  This time, the Mage-Colonel knew he was facing a Mage. His attack was focused and powerful, a tightly focused stream of fire that would cut through any defense a Mage could muster.

  Damien wasn’t there. He blinked forward, a teleportation spell putting him behind the three other Mages. Lightning flared out from his hand, slamming into one of Travere’s two Enforcers.

  This wasn’t the stun spell he’d used outside, and the smell of burnt flesh filled the hallway as the Scorpion went down hard.

  “Jump Mage,” Travere cursed, spinning as he spoke and sending another perfect lance of flame flashing out at Damien. The hotel walls behind him sparked and smoldered as the Envoy was, once more, somewhere else.

  “Hold him,” the Mage-Colonel snapped, and his remaining minion obeyed with a will. Bars of force tried to snap ont
o Damien, attempting to hold him in place for the stronger Colonel to deliver the death blow.

  Spell and counter-spell wove through space for a moment, then Damien redirected the whole mess into the wall. The side of the corridor disappeared, several entire hotel suites shattering into pieces that scattered across the mountainside.

  Damien followed up with a fire-blast of his own, the same tightly focused beam that Travere had attacked with. The Enforcer threw up a force shield to block it – only for Damien’s spell to burn clean through the defense and punch a fist-sized hole through the man’s chest.

  He and Travere faced each other in the corridor for a moment, the Ardennes’ soldier’s men dead around him. Then the second story of the building, above the rooms the struggle had blasted to splinters, collapsed.

  Debris blocked the daylight that had begun to stream in from the outside, and then the damage severed a hidden power cable in the roof, plunging the entire hallway outside the restaurant into darkness.

  There was silence in the hotel, any temptation to make noise on the part of the civilians locked into the restaurant buried by the clear and obvious signs of violence outside their door.

  Damien listened and looked carefully. Travere was in uniform, but not wearing any sort of headgear – he wouldn’t have thermal vision of any kind. Smiling to himself, the Envoy reached out with other senses – senses even another Mage wouldn’t have.

  Long ago, he’d learned to read the flow of magic in mankind’s runes. Under the Mage-King’s tutelage, the Rune Wright had learned to see any flow of magic – including that in the runes carved into the flesh of many Mages – and all combat Mages..

  “I can still see you, Colonel,” he said softly as he identified the shifting light of the other man’s magic. “I can sense the magic in your blood.

  “You challenged Mars, Travere,” he continued, closing on the other Mage. “How did you think it was going to end?”

  Travere’s response was light and fire. With one hand, the Mage-Colonel threw a ball of light into the air to allow him to see, and then he filled the entire hallway where he’d heard Damien speak with fire.