Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  #

  Two more MIS people were waiting when Samara led them into a briefing room. Romanov gestured for two of his Marines to take up guard positions outside the door, then settled himself against the wall next to the door while Damien and Wong took their seats.

  “These are Inspector Ryan Cook and Analyst Gunda Daniels,” Samara introduced her subordinates. “Ryan has been doing a lot of the grunt work of calling the various local police departments with your Warrant to get them to disgorge their case files. Gunda has been summarizing them for me and you.

  “Analyst Daniels spotted the link,” the senior Inspector told Damien. “I’ll allow her to explain.”

  Samara took a seat with Wong and Damien, gesturing for her most junior subordinate to speak.

  Daniels was a small woman with extremely dark skin and the slanted eyes of a Martian native. She was also even younger than Damien himself, and visibly swallowed as her boss put her on the spot.

  “The first thing we noticed,” she began, her voice barely above a whisper but rapidly growing louder and more confident as she spoke, “was that the sheer number of murders was unusually high. There’s always some variance—people don’t decide to kill each other on a neat schedule—but the entire planet normally sees an average of sixty-four murders a week.

  “In the three weeks since the destruction of the Keeper’s Archive, there have been just over five hundred confirmed murders or deaths otherwise regarded as suspicious,” Daniels told them. “This has been the deadliest three-week period on Mars in the last century.”

  That sent a chill down Damien’s spine. Just what had he set into motion?

  “We don’t normally track the movements of our citizens,” she continued, “but in the case of suspicious deaths and murders, we try and track backwards as best as we can. One hundred and twenty-two of those murder victims had been in the Hellas Montes Park the day of the Archive’s destruction.”

  “To be clear, Hand Montgomery, so were over eleven thousand other people,” Cook interjected. “But I agree with Gunda. That ratio was suspicious.”

  Daniels nodded to her compatriot, taking a drink of water before she continued.

  “That connection I was looking for was based on what I’d been told about the case,” she observed. “But since I’d found one connection, I wanted to see if I could find any others.”

  She tapped a command and a list of names and small photos filled the wall behind her.

  About a quarter of the names lit up in orange.

  “In orange are the victims we know were in the Hellas Montes Park the day the Archive was destroyed,” she noted. “In blue we have individuals who are members of the Grand Eagle’s Circle, a small charitable organization present in several northern Martian cities. The group is known for supporting literacy efforts in poorer neighborhoods but has a relatively small membership list.”

  About a third of the names in orange were now also lit up in blue. Another sixty or seventy of the other names on Daniels’ list were highlighted in blue.

  “How small?” Damien asked. “If a hundred of them are dead…”

  “Something like a fifth of the Circle’s membership has been killed in the last three weeks,” Daniels said flatly. “None of the rest appear to have been involved in anything…but neither do any of the ones who were murdered.”

  Damien eyed the list of names.

  “You have more.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “In green we have the members of the Friends of Hellas Montes Park,” Daniels told her audience, lighting up another selection of names. Half of the people who’d been in Hellas Montes Park that fateful day were green. So were about fifty others. At least a dozen names were highlighted in green, orange and blue.

  “The Friends are a rather large organization dedicated to raising funds for maintaining and improving the Park,” she noted. “These people all appear to have been regular volunteers, putting them inside a core group I can’t estimate the size of without far more information than they release to the public.”

  A fourth group of names highlighted in red. There was a single name that overlapped with the orange, but the red list encompassed at least eighty names.

  “These are known or suspected members of the Blue Tiger and Dark Sapphire drug rings,” Daniels noted. “Both are fragment organizations of the former Blue Star Syndicate that have spent the last month doing their best to exterminate each other. Their war is responsible for a good portion of our spike in murders…and probably unrelated to our investigation.”

  A final list of names lit up in purple.

  “Lastly, and I had to double-check to make sure this group existed, as it seemed quite odd to me, these are members of the Steel Library, a social group of ex-military librarians,” Daniels said. “Now, not all of our suspected Keepers from Hellas Montes were members of one of those three groups, but ten were members of all three, and there were at least thirty members of each of them among those hundred and twenty possibilities.”

  There were other names, Damien noted, that were tagged with more than one of her additional colors.

  “Based on this, I think that all three of these organizations require further investigation,” Daniels concluded. “Without explicit authorization and support, though, there is a limit to what we can do, and, well”—she shrugged—“we ran out of time before your arrival.”

  “This is good work, Analyst,” Damien told her, studying the chart. “Was Professor Raptis a member of any of these groups?”

  “He was both a member of the Circle and the Friends of Hellas Montes,” she said instantly.

  “I take it you need my authority to pull those organizations’ membership lists?” he asked.

  “That’s the starting point, yes,” Inspector Samara said, taking over from her subordinate. “Daniels and I will then correlate and see if we can identify persons of interest. What we do from there…”

  “Is up to me,” Damien concluded. “Would you like your Warrant in writing, Inspector?”

  #

  After the briefing, Damien and his people retreated to an empty meeting room where he proceeded to go over the massive pile of data that Wong and Samara’s people had pulled together for him. He had no illusions about his skill as a data analyst, but it was still worth it for him to review the data, just in case.

  The first thing he checked was the Mages. Raptis was at the top of list, but the fact that it was a list of more than one was statistically significant in itself. The normal ratio of Mages to mundanes was roughly one in five hundred thousand. It was closer to one in eighty thousand on Mars itself, but out of the five hundred murders in the last few weeks, forty-two Mages had died.

  Seventeen had been tied up in the drug war. One was an open-and-shut domestic, a suspected abusive husband shot repeatedly in the back by his wife. Of the remaining twenty-six, all made one of Daniels’s lists.

  Given that the Keepers had managed to produce an entire platoon’s worth of Combat Mages to try and take Damien down, he wasn’t surprised to discover they’d had a lot of Mage members.

  It was disturbing, however, to see that many Mages dead without them taking somebody with them. Even the weakest Mage was given some magical self-defense training. That many Mages dead without collateral damage suggested one of two things: they’d either been killed by friends or killed by people who knew exactly how to kill Mages.

  Like Legatan Augments, the cyborg police and spies Legatus used to maintain their anti-magic laws.

  Cyborgs that weren’t supposed to be on Mars.

  Raptis’s murder suggested he’d been killed by someone he knew, someone with the codes to disable his safehouse’s defenses. Other deaths were less clean, suggesting professionals but not people the victims had known.

  Damien sighed.

  “We have at least two players,” he said aloud.

  “My lord?” Romanov asked.

  “Some of the Mages were definitely killed by someone they knew
,” Damien told him. “Close range, no damage at all, regular police weren’t even aware if there were defenses.

  “Others were less clean. Sniper shots. Poison. Defenses triggered but without fatalities.” Damien shook his head. “We have at least two teams if not two entirely separate groups killing Keepers.”

  “That’s…that’s not good, boss.”

  “No.”

  He still wasn’t entirely sure what he’d set into motion, but more and more, Damien was beginning to feel like someone had intentionally pulled the Keepers out into the open and pointed him at them—and was finishing the job themselves now that Damien had scattered them.

  The alien runes at Andala IV had been a trigger, but just what had they triggered?

  #

  Damien’s digging into the files they had on the Keepers and the recent murders didn’t get him much of anywhere over the ensuing hour before he was interrupted by a buzzing from his wrist-comp.

  “This is Montgomery,” he answered it briskly.

  “It’s Inspector Samara,” the MIS officer told him. “I think Daniels has made a breakthrough.”

  “I’m listening,” Damien replied. “I’ll take anything I can get.”

  “We’ve been looking into the three organizations we identified as potential Keeper fronts,” Samara explained. “We’ve got the volunteer list for the Friends of Hellas Montes Park, but the Grand Eagle’s Circle and the Steel Library are both smaller organizations and in some degree of disarray right now.

  “We’re pulling together the resources to raid their offices for files,” she continued calmly, “but we found something interesting in the Friends’ files.

  “The Friends of Hellas Montes Park were a key contributor to a library built in the town of New Andes, just outside the north side of the park. The other key contributors were an anonymous donor, the Grand Eagle’s Circle, and the Steel Library.”

  “That sounds suspicious,” Damien agreed.

  “We also discovered that the head librarian is an ex–Royal Martian Marine Corps Captain: Miles Kessler. We’re not sure if he’s a member of the Steel Library, but it seems likely.”

  Damien rose to his feet, folding away his data chips and gesturing for Romanov to pack up his people’s gear.

  “My shuttle is still on the roof,” he told Samara. “Would you care to join me for a quick flight, Inspector Samara?”

  “Inshallah,” she told him. “I’ll be there in two minutes.”

  #

  New Andes was just over ninety minutes’ flight away at a regular pace, and Damien was spending the time carefully checking over his runes again.

  Around him, his personal detail was checking through their weapons as well. When he realized that Romanov was directing several of his Marines to get into full exosuit armor, he leveled a questioning gaze on his senior bodyguard.

  “Overkill much?” he murmured.

  “My lord, from what Amiri told me when I took this job, there is no such thing when it comes to your affairs. We’ll keep them on the shuttle, out of sight and out of mind, unless we need them.”

  Damien shook his head but didn’t stop the Marines suiting up. The assault shuttle was designed to carry a full thirty-man platoon in exosuit combat armor and actually had suits in lockers aboard for all twenty of his detail.

  Not that the Secret Service agents, as opposed to the Marines seconded to his bodyguard, were necessarily experienced in using them. They were trained in their use, but his Marines had actually taken them into combat.

  “Shouldn’t we be getting a strike team of some kind?” Samara asked. The MIS Inspector had thrown an armored vest on over her blouse and tied her headscarf to its straps to secure it, but she was still under-armed and under-armored compared to the crowd.

  “I am a Hand,” Damien pointed out. “While I do, on occasion, actually need bodyguards, I probably use them more as a strike team than anything else.”

  He gestured around at the rapidly arming men and women around them.

  “They’re used to it,” he observed.

  Before Samara could respond, her wrist computer buzzed. She tapped it and lifted it to her face.

  “Samara.”

  “Boss, it’s Daniels,” the young MIS Analyst told her. “You’re in the air with the Hand, right?”

  “Yes. He can hear you,” Samara noted carefully.

  “Good. We have a problem. A big one.”

  “What kind of problem, Analyst?” Damien asked. Daniels sounded stressed, so gentle prodding seemed to be the best option.

  “I don’t know what’s going on, but the New Andes Library just lit up a full emergency alert—and then burst into flames.”

  “Thank you, Analyst,” he told her softly. “You’re right, that is a problem. We’ll deal with it.”

  “How?” Samara demanded as she cut the channel. “If the building is on fire—”

  “Romanov!” Damien snapped, pulling the Mage-Captain back to them. “I take back everything I said about the exosuits. Strap everybody into one and tell the pilot to use my overrides to cut us a clear path to New Andes and go to full speed.”

  “Yes, sir,” Romanov said calmly. “That bad?”

  “Bad enough.”

  #

  Chapter 9

  From the vaguely sick expression on Inspector Munira Samara’s face, the MIS officer had never been aboard a Marine assault shuttle making a combat approach before. Most of the normal torque was missing due to the lack of ground fire, but the variable acceleration appeared to be enough to make her uncomfortable.

  It had been a long time since Damien’s first assault landing. He mostly ignored the maneuvers and acceleration while studying satellite footage of the town they were heading for.

  New Andes was a post-terraforming town that had never been domed. It sprawled out in a way few of the older settlements on Mars did, but it was also a tourist town where the economy was driven by the proximity to the Hellas Montes Park.

  Ten thousand permanent residents, about the same in transients. The town had probably needed a library long before the Keepers’ fronts had built them one. While he was certain their “charity” had been with an ulterior motive, all three of the organizations they’d linked to the Keepers really had been doing good works.

  “Locals report that the fires are resisting any attempt at suppression,” the pilot announced over the intercom. “They’re mostly confused, but our scanners are suggesting someone intentionally spread volatile chemicals through the building.”

  “We need to find the head librarian and any intact Keeper archives we can grab,” Damien told him. “This is going to be hot and nasty. Right in the middle of the fire.”

  “All right.” He heard the pilot exhale. “Disembarkment will be in forty-five seconds at fifty meters.”

  Damien heard Samara struggle to raise her head and look at him.

  “At fifty meters?” she asked. “Your men have ’suits; how are we getting down?”

  “Magic,” he told her with a smile. “You’re with me, Inspector. We’ll be fine.”

  “Twenty seconds.”

  “The building is still on fire,” she pointed out.

  “And I plan on fixing that. You don’t have to drop with us, but…do you trust me?”

  “Five seconds!”

  “All right,” she agreed.

  The time was up. The bottom of the assault shuttle’s main cargo bay swung open, dropping out from beneath their feet.

  The exosuited Marines and Secret Service Agents went first, plummeting away the moment the floor dropped out.

  Damien had released his straps and would normally have dropped right after them, but Samara was still buckled into the shuttle. He held himself in midair and offered her his hand.

  She snapped herself free with sudden confidence, dropping away after the exosuits—and Damien followed, gently grabbing her wrist as he wrapped his magic around them both to guide and control their descent.

  Beneath them,
the exosuits were slamming through the roof of the burning building like drunken meteors, gouts of flame flashing up around the armored men and women. Fire engines continued to soak the area around the building with water, containing the fire as Damien and his people went in.

  He inhaled sharply, summoning power and channeling it through his runes as he began to change the air in the building. Fire needed oxygen to burn, so he starved it, replacing the oxygen in the top floor of the building with nitrogen pulled from the outside atmosphere, working his way down while trying to identify the pockets of survivors and keep the air safe around them.

  “The fire is starting to go out,” one of the Marines reported.

  “And the air is going to stop being breathable,” Damien replied. “Find any survivors ASAP; I can only keep the fire under so much control while keeping them alive.”

  “That’s why we have armor,” Romanov replied. “We’re moving in.”

  #

  Mage-Captain Denis Romanov led his people into the flames, his own magic sweeping a clear path ahead of him. The localized wind gusts he was using to keep the fire off of his armor weren’t as broadly effective as the overall starving of the fire that his boss was doing, but they were something Denis could do and sustain.

  “Coral, Massey,” he snapped crisply as his two senior Marines. “Take a fire team, sweep a floor. Coral take third, Massey take second. Our priority is getting any survivors out, clear?”

  “On it.”

  “The rest of you”—he gestured at the Secret Service agents, less comfortable in their armor but still effective—“are with me. We keep going down until we hit the ground, then sweep. First call is evac survivors; I doubt any of the attackers are left.

  “That said, if someone draws on you, put them down,” he ordered. “No unnecessary risks.”

  He’d have ordered no risks, but they were inside a burning and collapsing building. If any of his people had wanted a risk-free life, they shouldn’t have taken the assignment to a Hand’s personal detachment.