Hand of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 2)

by Glynn Stewart

  She killed the channel and turned to Brute.

  “Take us down,” she ordered.

  #

  At some point, Vaughn was sure, the woman in charge of the emergency command center was going to work up the nerve to tell her planet’s leader to get out of the center’s main operating theater. Depending on what was going on at that moment in time, he might even listen to her.

  Until she did, however, this was the best place to keep an eye on the events rapidly sweeping Ardennes. Allarain had been their biggest – if most mixed – success, but operations were being carried out across the planet.

  So far, most successes had been minor. Given time, however, he was sure they’d find another loose thread that would lead them to either the Wing – or perhaps even more importantly, to Montgomery. The last thing Vaughn needed was someone with authority to counter his tale of what had happened.

  The various techs and officers were quiet, trying carefully not to attract the Mage-Governor’s attention. When one of them started tapping keys with a concerned face, their muttering caught his ear.

  “What is it, son?” Vaughn asked, the surprise of his arrival causing the young man to swallow his gum and choke.

  A glass of water and a chance to regain his equilibrium later, the officer – a lanky blond youth barely old enough for his Lieutenant’s bars, checked his screens again then looked up at the Governor.

  “The Nouveaux Versailles Bastille has gone off the air,” he admitted aloud.

  “That’s not possible,” the Colonel commanding the center objected. The woman had clearly seen Vaughn descend on her staff officer and rushed over to either save his ass or throw him under the bus – the Governor wasn’t sure which.

  “Why not?” Vaughn asked quietly. “We’ve over thirty Freedom Wing terrorists locked up there. If there’s anywhere the rebels would try and attack, it would be that Bastille. It should be suicide,” he agreed, “but they may still manage to disable the communications.”

  “The Bastilles aren’t radio stations that can just ‘go off the air’,” the Colonel replied, a strained patience in her voice that Vaughn noted for later. “They’re the highest security prisons on the planet. They have hard lines and dedicated communication satellites; there is no way for them to be jammed or cut off.”

  “I’d agree with you ma’am,” the Lieutenant told her, with a panicked glance at Vaughn. “Except that we’re getting no communication from them. I’ve tested the channels – the satellite and cable are still intact. There’s just… nothing coming from the Bastille.”

  “Get me satellite overhead,” Vaughn demanded. “If we have a dedicated coms satellite, please tell me it has a fucking camera?”

  “It should, sir,” the junior officer told him, busying himself with his console as Vaughn turned a wary eye on the Colonel.

  “What do we have as a rapid reaction force?” he demanded.

  “… not much,” she admitted. “Most of the Scorpions are tied up in the global sweep for the terrorists. We could leverage Army units, but…”

  “I’d rather not have the Army in one of the Bastilles,” Vaughn agreed, considering.

  “I’ve got visual on Versailles Bastille, sir, ma’am,” the Lieutenant interjected. Without asking for further instruction, he threw the satellite image up on the screen where his two superiors could see.

  Two helicopter gunships, their forms vague and blurry as their mottled gray color closely matched the concrete below them, orbited the central courtyard. Three more were on the ground. It was hard to tell at the level of detail on the image, but it looked like they were unloading people.

  “That’s not possible,” the Colonel objected. “The anti-air would have shot down anyone trying to assault the facility!”

  “It has happened, Colonel,” Vaughn told her sharply. He turned back to the junior officer. “What is your name, son?”

  “Lieutenant Romain Duval, sir,” the youth replied.

  “Well, Captain Duval, get me Generals Montoya and Zu on the line on the double,” Vaughn ordered the freshly promoted officer. Proving his worth almost immediately, Duval promptly grabbed the nearest three techs and began placing calls.

  Vaughn turned back to the Colonel in charge of the center.

  “My aversion to Army units is weakening, Colonel,” he admitted. “But please tell me we have something else.”

  “We have a battalion running air and ground security on the Central District itself,” she told him, consulting her personal computer as she spoke. “If we strip them down to the exterior barricades – leave the RTA to regular security guards and a few patrols, we should be able to load two companies – four hundred men – into transports in the next half an hour.”

  Vaughn considered. He didn’t like leaving the Central District vulnerable – while he’d organized the only actual attack to hit there himself, there was a risk the attack had emboldened groups that didn’t realize that.

  The alternative was to watch the only prisoners they’d taken be whisked out of his highest security prison like it was a daycare.

  “Do it,” he ordered, then turned to Captain Duval. “Do you have them?”

  “Both General Zu and General Montoya are on the line and waiting in your office, sir,” the young man replied.

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  #

  Amiri transferred the link to the Bastille’s systems to her personal computer and dropped out of the back of the gunship. The Wing had provided her with a set of body armor, and no-one had yet tried to take the battle laser back.

  Landing in the middle of the courtyard, she waved Brute back into the air as she ducked over to the short platoon of troopers the Wing had sent along.

  “Keep an eye on us from above,” she told the pilot. “We’re not trying to be sneaky, so it’s not a question of if help is coming, you get me?”

  “I got you,” Brute replied. “Good luck!”

  Turning to the troops around here, Amiri gave them a wintry smile.

  “Looks like the Scorpions are keeping their heads down,” she said loudly. “Unfortunately for them, we need the command center – I can apparently shut down their guns more easily than I can get cell numbers!”

  That got a chuckle from the rebels, though it was also completely true. The codes Montgomery had provided had allowed her to assume direct control of the Bastille’s weapons systems and shut down their communications, but it didn’t actually give her access to the Bastille’s internal databases.

  At least some of the rebels knew the rough layout of the facility, though, and the assault team quickly sorted themselves out into order as they charged deeper into the massive concrete fortress.

  The first few floors passed with no resistance. Amiri spotted the hatches and rails of layer upon layer of automated defenses that would have killed them all in the first few steps, but the codes Montgomery had given her had shut everything down.

  Two floors down, they ran into a heavy security gate. The automated turrets on either side were slumped in uselessness, but the heavy steel barricade itself remained in place.

  “Should we blast it?” one of the troopers, carrying a similar laser to Amiri’s own, asked.

  “Give me a moment,” she replied. There was a keypad next to the door. She crossed to it and checked it against her personal computer. The data key Montgomery had given her hummed softly for less than a second and then threw up an eight digit code.

  Waving for the rebels to take up positions, she punched in the code. The lights on the pad flashed several times, then the door slowly ground upwards.

  The Scorpions on the other side had clearly been expecting a more violent breach. It took them a moment to process the door opening from behind their impromptu barricade – a moment the rebels took full advantage of to grab whatever cover they could.

  Amiri pressed herself against the wall next to the keypad, taking cover against the disabled turret as a fusillade of bullets passed her in both directions
.

  Then the distinctive ‘hiss-crack’ of a weapons grade laser hitting skin and vaporizing chunks of flesh interrupted the gunfire, followed almost immediately by the rapid coughing sound of an automatic grenade launcher.

  Six explosions later, the gunfire from inside the hatch ceased. It took a moment more for the rebels to stop shooting – their trigger discipline was better than she’d expected, but still worse than real soldiers or even the bounty hunters she’d worked with before.

  Two of the Freedom Wing rebels were wounded. Stepping through the hatchway, Amiri counted six… possibly seven, it was hard to be sure, Scorpions. The prison guards had carried light weapons and no body armor, versus the heavy weapons and combat body armor the Freedom Wing had equipped their people with.

  It hadn’t been a fair fight.

  “This way, we’re still four floors up from the command center,” the rebel leading the way said grimly.

  “How many guards are there?” Amiri asked, falling into step beside him.

  “Not many,” he told her. “When the ASPF” – Ardennes System Police Force, the star system level police force that the Scorpions tended to walk all over now – “ran the Bastilles, we had twenty people in each. They couldn’t add many more without turning cells into barracks.”

  “Let’s hope they didn’t,” she replied, glancing back at the two soldiers they were leaving behind with one of their pair of medics. “I don’t know if we can handle being outnumbered.”

  #

  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!”

  #

  Chapter 29

  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 lu
ck 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.