Damien took the pills and shook his head at the doctor.
“I hope you’re right,” he told Staite. “That things will hold together till morning.”
Amiri smiled and patted a long black object leaned against the wall next to the door. It took him a second to recognize the military battle laser - a squad support weapon, usually.
“I’ll guarantee you this, Montgomery,” she said with a small smile. “You’ll still be here come morning.”
The medications were already kicking in, and Damien returned the smile as he laid back down. Everything might be coming apart - but at least he had someone to watch his back.
#
Riordan returned in the morning, before Staite’s drugs had worn off. Amiri had cat-napped through the night, being willing to give the hotel’s security some credit, and was sitting in a chair she’d moved over in front of Montgomery’s door when the rebel returned, the battle laser across her lap like a pet cat.
“How is he?” the rebel asked.
“Sleeping,” Amiri told him pointedly. At this point, she was ranking ‘keep the Envoy alive’ high on her list of priorities. She liked Riordan, but there were limits.
He simply nodded and threw himself into the couch. His hair was mussed and his suit rumpled; he looked like he hadn’t slept at all.
“Hell of a night,” he said aloud. “We got everyone in High Ardennes buried three layers deep. Hopefully it will be enough.”
“Against what?” Amiri asked.
“Whole fucking battalion of Scorps, headed up by General Montoya’s favorite pet Mage sadist, is heading this way,” Riordan said grimly. “We’ve got eyes on them, don’t think they’re coming for us, but we don’t know who they are coming for.”
“I didn’t think the Guild liked sadists,” Amiri pointed out.
“Yeah, but the Testers get real snarky if they put too many obstacles in the way of Mages by Right.”
She winced.
The Royal Testers were, in general, a hugely necessary and positive part of the Protectorate’s structure. They traveled from world to world, school to school, testing every child of the Protectorate’s far-flung stars for the gift of magic. For those born to the families of Mages, with the privilege and history those clans inevitably gathered, it was almost a formality - Mages married Mages, so their children were almost always Mages.
For the rest of humanity, it was even more of a formality - Mages found in the general population, those who would become Mages by Right like Montgomery, were roughly one in a million. Since they didn’t have the family connections of Mages by Blood, the Testers stepped into a similar place in their lives.
And, if a Mage by Right was a sadist, it might well get swept under the rug in the Protectorate’s unending appetite for new Mages for everything from antimatter production to the Navy.
“Just the fact that Mage-Colonel Travere is in command makes me nervous,” Riordan admitted to her. “He brought a bunch of combat trained Mages with him, but we don’t have any Mages here in High Ardennes. If he’s coming for us, he hasn’t brought enough heavy weapons for the job - but he’s brought too many Mages for anything else we can think of.”
Something buzzed in Riordan’s jacket and he pulled out what Amiri recognized as a military-grade encrypted communicator. Like a lot of the gear she’d been seeing so far, it had been made on Legatus. If the rebellion’s equipment was being smuggled in from offworld, she would have expected more of it to be from different places - or mostly from Amber, known for not asking questions of its exports.
Riordan held the com to his ear, triggering a privacy field while he spoke into it. Halfway through the conversation, he blanched, his face turning pale and staying that way.
Finally, he lay it aside and looked back at Amiri. He looked even more tired than he had before.
“They bypassed High Ardennes,” he said quietly. “Nobody’s sure, but we think they’re headed for the Sunshine Resort.”
“Which is?”
He shook his head.
“I know who you work for, and I still forget you’re not from here,” he told her. “Sunshine is way up in the mountains, the best ski slope and hotel near High Ardennes. We… aren’t entirely sure why they’re headed there, but they’ve already cut off all communication from the resort.”
“Whatever’s going to happen out there, they don’t want anyone to see it.”
#
It was another twenty minutes, with no further news, before Montgomery woke up. Amiri heard him moving around and stepped back into the hotel room where the Envoy was slowly getting dressed.
She hadn’t found him a new suit, and his body armor had been shredded, but she’d at least dug up a pair of slacks and a dress shirt that fit him. As she entered, he was buttoning the shirt up, closing the collar overtop of the leather band wrapped around his neck and its gold medallion.
As soon as the door closed behind her, he turned and held out his hand wordlessly.
Amiri didn’t ask what he was after. She dropped the tiny and intimidating weight of the Hand into his palm. It sat there for a long, long moment. Then it buzzed slightly as it warmed against his skin and popped out its access port. Gently, he closed it back up and then hung it around his neck, under the shirt.
“It is mine,” he said quietly. “That’s what I spent the last three years training for, but I wasn’t ready yet. Alaura was supposed to teach me.”
“Not anymore,” Amiri told him.
“Not anymore,” he agreed.
“Have you thought about my suggestion?” she asked. “Honestly, just getting you out alive will bring Vaughn down and finish the mission.”
“I know,” he said quietly. “But what do you think will happen here if we run, Amiri?” he asked, gesturing around them. “Vaughn has blamed the death of a Hand on the rebels. He likely believes he can get away with anything in ‘the pursuit of Stealey’s killers’.”
Montgomery paused, looking away from Amiri and at the wall.
“If he succeeded in fooling the Hands, he would be right,” he admitted. “A Hand falls. Another rises, and they rise for vengeance as much as justice. With Cor working for Vaughn, too… we can’t leave, Amiri,” he concluded. “Whether or not I’m supposed to have this yet,” he touched the amulet under his shirt, “I have it. And I’m here. I have to do something.”
Amiri let disappointment run through her for a moment. Part of her wanted to knock out Montgomery and Riordan, package them up and ship them off-planet with her. The two idiots who’d fallen into her care were going to get her killed.
“I guess I work for you now,” she said with a sigh. Alaura would have come to the same conclusion. He might not think he was supposed to have the Hand yet, but he certainly seemed to be thinking like one of the overly noble twits Desmond picked for the job. “What do we do?”
“Vaughn has most of the planet on his side,” Montgomery observed. “The pair of us are a little outnumbered. We need to talk to the Freedom Wing. We’re going to need them.”
“Conveniently, there’s a gentleman just outside with an encrypted military-grade com to the rest of their leadership,” Amiri told him. “Should I introduce you?”
#
Chapter 21
Dawn was rising over the pristine snow of autumn in the mountains. The pale golden rays of Ardennes’ sun shone across the fresh fall, and were obliterated as metal tracks smashed into the scant inches of white.
Four light tanks led the way up the mountain, their treads spraying the snow off the road and across the cleared ditches around them.
Behind them, five armored personnel carriers preceded ten heavy transport trucks, followed by five more APCs and a final pair of light tanks to close off the column.
The image flipped to another camera, and the room around Lori was dead silent. Sunshine was a low slung chalet-style hotel with only one road in and out. A car trying to leave had just run into the tanks. The cameras planted along the road the previous ni
ght couldn’t pick up sound, but the gesturing of the officer sitting on top of the lead tank was unmistakeable.
The driver’s response clearly wasn’t acceptable. With a gesture, the officer ripped the door off of the car and gestured troops forward. The driver and passengers were dragged from the vehicle and off to the side. Once they were out, the officer - the Mage - gestured again, throwing the entire car off the road.
“I know who they’re after,” the smooth voice of Agent Papa said quietly in Lori’s ear. She had her com feeding to an ear bud right now - everyone’s gaze was focused on the image being fed to a projector screen in the conference room beneath High Ardennes’ third-best hotel.
“Who?” she demanded quietly. She hadn’t heard from Papa since everything had started to come apart - the man was in Nouveaux Normandy, so the clocks were ahead of them, and he’d been busy with his own affairs.
“I was asked not to tell you,” he continued. “I work with them in… my other capacities, but they do know I work with you as well. Now,” he sighed. “I do not think even the seal of the confessional should bind me now.”
“Who, Papa?” she repeated.
“The Green Party was holding its annual conference in Sunshine,” Papa said quietly. “They kept it quiet - for all that they’re allowed to hold their seats, they don’t want to draw too much attention to themselves.”
Lori nodded slowly. When her Freedom Party had abandoned Ardennes’ farce of a democracy, the Ardennes Green Party - latest in a long legacy of environmentally focused political groups stretching back to Old Earth - had become the only opposing voice in the Ardennes Planetary Parliament.
The presence of an opposition bloc - even if it was only five seats out of two hundred - helped legitimize Vaughn’s election victories. So he tolerated them, even as they attempted to be a voice of conscience with regards to the rapacious environmental policies his government followed.
Apparently, that tolerance had run out.
“They can’t be the only people up there,” she whispered.
“They sent Travere, Alpha,” Papa said quietly. “That tells us what we need to know. For their sakes, I pray they surrender without a fight.”
Lori turned her attention back to the image on the screen. The armored personnel carriers had formed a solid wall of metal across the only way down the mountain, then disgorged their troops. The Scorpions formed a loose skirmish line surrounding the building, while Mage-Colonel Travere and the tanks went right up to the main doors.
With a flippant gesture, Travere’s magic ripped the main hotel doors off. The tanks leveled their main guns on the gaping hole, and the Scorpions charged in.
Like the rest of the cell in the room with her, Lori Armstrong watched in silence. Her enemy couldn’t reach her - the Wing was buried deep now. So instead, Vaughn was lashing out at whoever he could reach.
And she couldn’t do anything. To stop a battalion of Scorpions would take enough force to be all-too-visible - and she didn’t trust the Navy not to annihilate High Ardennes from space to kill them.
“Alpha, its Lambda,” another voice interrupted her thoughts. “I need to talk to you. Private channel.”
#
Damien was doing his best to pretend to be patient. After Riordan had disappeared to ‘consult with his superiors’, the young Mage had taken a seat on the luxurious couch in the suite’s sitting area and started reading a book on his personal computer.
He wasn’t sure he’d progressed more than a single page in the hour he’d been waiting, and he doubted that Amiri was fooled in the slightest. The woman hadn’t survived as a bounty hunter before meeting Alaura Stealey by being unobservant.
Finally, Riordan returned to the suite, carefully shutting the door and locking it behind him before grabbing a chair and facing Damien.
“Well?” Damien demanded. “Did you set a meeting?”
He knew immediately that the rebel had done nothing of the sort as the man shifted uneasily in the chair.
“Everything is going to hell,” he finally said. “Alpha isn’t sure we can trust you - or that it’s worth the risk for us to even consider working with you. After all,” he shrugged hesitantly, “at this point, your goals are our goals. We don’t lose by leaving you to go back to Mars on your own.”
“Right, so we’re on plan ‘get the fuck out’ then, are we?” Amiri asked.
Damien held up a hand to forestall her enthusiasm.
“You’re not done,” he told Riordan. “What else?”
Riordan glanced at where Amiri had risen to her feet, the Legatan battle laser in her hands, and swallowed hard.
“We do have a problem,” he admitted. “One we can’t safely address ourselves, but if you were to intervene, Alpha might reconsider the value of an alliance.”
“Of course. What do you want?” Damien demanded.
“The Scorpion battalion that bypassed High Ardennes has seized the resort at Sunshine,” Riordan told him. “That was, apparently, where the Green Party was holding their annual convention. Vaughn has arrested the entirety of the opposition in Parliament.”
“He thinks that the death of a Hand will cover many sins,” the Envoy said quietly. “If he succeeds in convincing Mars that you killed Stealey, he will be right.”
“We can’t rescue the Greens,” Riordan admitted. “We’d attract too much attention, and we’re not sure Vaughn and Cor would hesitate to blow High Ardennes away from orbit if we do rescue them.”
“Whereas if I do something, it can be chalked up to a desperate search for allies,” Damien replied thoughtfully. It made sense, though it was dangerous. An entire battalion? “What sort of force did they take the resort with?”
“Mechanized infantry,” the rebel replied immediately. “Six tanks, dozen or so APCs. At least half a dozen Mages under Mage-Colonel Travere.”
“Half a dozen Mages,” Amiri said quietly. “Damien, I don’t like that math.”
Damien considered the odds. Amiri had to have at least some clue what the runes inlaid across his torso were - she’d worked with Alaura long enough to have seen the Hand’s Rune of Power. Six Mages, plus a battalion of conventional troops…
“We’ll have to be very clever,” he responded. “A direct assault would be suicide.”
Both Riordan and Amiri stared at him like he was insane. Apparently, a direct assault hadn’t crossed anyone else’s mind.
“I don’t suppose you can give us any help?” Damien asked Riordan.
“Alpha didn’t say one way or another, and I want to save those people,” he replied. “I’ve got footage of the attack, maps of the complex, and a vehicle. I don’t think I can put up manpower, but…”
“How about explosives?” the younger Mage asked. “And I’ll need active links to any cameras you have around the site. For that matter, I’ll want cameras that we can set up - I’ll need surveillance around the entire exterior.”
“I can get some mining explosives pretty quickly,” Riordan told him. “Rockets or grenades… would take a couple of days.”
“Mining explosives will do,” Damien told him. “I’ll need proper winter gear,” he gestured at the slacks and shirt he wore. He glanced over at Amiri. “So will Julia, though I don’t think she’ll need any more weapons. You seem fond of that laser.”
“It’s a handy toy,” she replied, eyeing him carefully. “You have a plan?”
“Like I said,” Damien Montgomery told his team - such as it was. “We’re going to have to be very clever.”
#
Chapter 22
It might not have been winter yet in Ardennes’ northern hemisphere, but it was still bitterly cold on the mountains above the Sunshine resort. Despite the effective - and expensive - winter gear that Riordan had managed to procure in short order, Julia Amiri shivered against the chill.
If pressed, she might have admitted that the flashing red “POTENTIAL AVALANCHE” warning on the bottom of her snow goggles made her nervous. The super-modern ‘
glasses’ contained a suite of sensors that were scanning the snow around her, and linked in to the weather satellites and other tools.
The snow beneath her was old, leftover from last winter and crusted over. Amiri wasn’t hugely experienced with snow, but she had no reason to mistrust the snow goggles’ warning.
Beneath her, down the slope of the mountain, she could see the main entrance to Sunshine and the row of tanks and APCs blocking anyone trying to leave or enter the resort. There weren’t many Scorpions visible on the grounds - most were inside the hotel and other buildings.
This was the last of the eight charges she’d put together from the mining explosives, and she sighed as she very carefully made her way off the slope. The warning on her glasses slowly faded to a dull orange, still strongly suggesting that she should be somewhere - anywhere - else.
“Charges set,” she said softly into her microphone. “Moving to a safe zone and setting up the laser.”
“We’re not ready down here yet,” Riordan told her. The Freedom Wing cell leader’s voice was strained, but then he and Damien were climbing up the side of the mountain. Automated equipment had got Amiri onto the top of the mountain, but the men were going to be too close to any sensors the Scorpions might have set up.
“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.
Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars Page 15