Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  The stairwells were nice broad things, with a meter and a half–wide gap all of the way down. Denis went over the edge before giving himself time to think, dropping three stories to crash into the tiled concrete of the main floor with a ground-shattering crunch.

  Most of that floor had been taken up by a large open space filled with bookshelves. Not all of those shelves’ contents would have been paper books, but enough were to make the space an inferno…and enough weren’t to surround that inferno with toxic smoke.

  “I’ve got movement!” someone reported. “Shit, there’s kids over here.”

  Denis didn’t even react consciously. He pulled his team’s sensor reports and located the area, charging through the fire toward where his people had identified the class of kids. There were twenty of them backed into a corner of the library where two adults had shoved them before trying, desperately, to keep the fire at bay with handheld fire extinguishers.

  A twenty-sixth-century handheld extinguisher was a capable device, but it wasn’t that capable. Smoke had clearly taken most of the kids down—hopefully nonlethally!—and one of the adults wasn’t in much better shape.

  The other was still holding one of the handheld extinguishers, trying grimly to get any more foam out of a clearly empty canister while the fire sparked across the barrier they’d already laid. It was a losing battle, and Denis’s exosuit’s sensors calmly informed him that the roof was only a few minutes from collapse.

  He emerged from the fire, probably looking like some kind of troll out of a nightmare, and loomed over the still-standing adult.

  “What’s on the other side of the wall?” he demanded.

  “What?” the man coughed.

  “The other side of that wall,” Denis pointed past the kids.

  “Outside, I think, but it’s twenty centimeters of…”

  Denis was a fully trained Royal Martian Marine Corps Combat Mage. Short of the Mage-King and his Hands, there were few deadlier or more destructive individuals in the galaxy. His armor might have lacked the amplifying runes of a Royal Guardsman’s, but it linked into the projector rune in his palm just fine.

  He turned a dozen square meters of twenty-centimeter-thick concrete wall to fine powder with a gesture and slammed more power into the air above him to hold the roof in place.

  “Get them out,” he snapped, more to his people than the one still-standing teacher. Four exosuited Secret Service Agents were already moving in, while a fifth deployed the fire suppression gear they’d carried down to cover the evacuation.

  “All units, report,” he snapped. “We have survivors on the main floor, a class of kids.”

  “Third floor had eight older kids and an adult,” Corporal Coral said grimly. “We’re evacing now, but I don’t know if any of them will make it.”

  “Second had staff and researchers,” Corporal Massey reported. “Eighteen adults. Four might make it.”

  “My lord,” Denis linked back to Montgomery. “Do you have contact with the locals?”

  “Inspector Samara does,” the Hand replied dryly. “I have contained the fire. I’m also maintaining clear zones around the identified survivors.” He paused. “Inspector Samara reports the locals say there should have been twenty-two staff and three teachers in the building. We’ve got the right number of kids, but we’re short at least four adults.”

  There was a loud popping noise above him.

  “Second and third floors are clear,” Montgomery told him, a flash of fatigue tinging his voice. “I have the main-floor fire contained. Is there a basement?”

  “See if the locals can get us floor plans,” Denis asked. “Without the plans…time to make another door.”

  #

  The floor resisted Denis’s power about as much as the wall had, a two-meter radius of concrete and title vanishing into dust and dropping him and five exosuited Secret Service agents down a full four meters into the inferno below.

  His suit was rated to survive deep space, plasma fire, high-velocity bullets…and it started flashing warning signs as they landed in the New Andes Library basement.

  “I can see why they can’t put the fires out with water,” he observed. “The basement has been flooded with incendiaries of some kind. Suit scanners can’t distinguish, but there’s both gasoline and phosphorous down here.”

  “What the fuck?” the Hand snapped. “Can you stabilize it?”

  Even Montgomery’s trick of stealing the oxygen wouldn’t be enough down here. Unless his suit was wrong about the ingredients, this mess didn’t even need oxygen to burn; the mix had its own oxidizer included.

  “Negative,” he admitted. “I don’t think even you can put this out, my lord. I’m going to sweep for survivors and bodies, but…” He studied the warnings on his suit. “We’re going to have to write the building off, sir,” he said softly. “This is irretrievable.”

  “Understood,” Montgomery said shortly. “Keep me informed; let me know if you need a rescue.”

  If anyone would be able to rip open the ground and pull Denis and his people out, it would be Montgomery.

  “Yes, sir,” Denis replied. “Moving in.”

  There was no point even trying to give his people instructions by anything except radio. His sensors happily informed him the fire outside was too loud to be heard over.

  This was overkill for a library.

  “Sweep for cooler spots,” he ordered. “Record everything. This mess tells me there was something else down here.”

  It felt like he was wading as he moved, the flames from the noxious mix that someone had dumped all over the basement flickering up around his greaves. Even through the armor, he was feeling the warmth as he tried to navigate by thermal scanners and micropulses.

  There.

  “I’ve got a cooler zone,” he reported. “Looks like there was none of this super-napalm dumped there. Moving over.”

  The room at the south end of the basement hadn’t been covered, but the heat would have been fatal to an unarmored human. There was no oxygen left in the air, only smoke and toxic fumes. Without his scanners, Denis wasn’t even sure he’d have been able to see.

  There might not have been napalm in the room, but everything that was in the room was burning, with shelves full of books thrown onto the floor…and the fire had reached the bodies in the middle of the room. Three adults; Denis couldn’t tell much more in their current state, but they were very dead.

  “My lord, I have three bodies,” Denis noted. “I suspect we’ll want them intact.”

  “I agree,” the Hand told him instantly. “Hold one moment, I’m studying your video feed for angles and… There.”

  The three bodies vanished in an imploding rush of magic, and Denis was starting to move away… when the wall on the other side of the room exploded, the pent-up force of the noxious mix the place had been filled with turning the space on the other side of the concealed hatch into a fuel-air explosive.

  Denis threw his magic forward without a thought, focusing and channeling the explosion down. In the back of his mind, he felt the Hand’s power join him a moment later, their magic capturing the force of the FAE and forcing it downward, containing it in the already wrecked library rather than allowing it to wreck the town.

  Finally, it faded. The room was a crater now, the far wall clearly once having been an armored hatch…but that hatch was melted metal, chunks of it stuck to Denis’s armor as he moved forward into the wreckage, his suit complaining about every motion.

  “Well, there was an underground bunker here,” he concluded aloud. “But someone beat us to it.

  “And they did not care about collateral damage.”

  #

  Chapter 10

  Even Damien was drained by the effort of containing an explosion of the scale that had been buried under the New Andes Library. Nonetheless, he straightened his spine and turned a tired smile on the Martian Planetary Police officer who approached him and Samara.

  “Sir… My lord Hand?”
she said questioningly. “We hadn’t even requested assistance yet.”

  “We were on the way for other reasons,” Damien told her. “Report, Lieutenant.”

  That was apparently enough to bring her mostly back to the present, and the officer, a tall and graceful woman with long braided blond hair, saluted crisply.

  “Lieutenant Marianne Suzuki, my lord,” she told him. “I run the New Andes MPP detachment. We…don’t see much activity here, but we assist the local fire department when they need the hands.”

  “What happened here?” Damien asked quietly.

  “We got a call reporting smoke and fire in the library forty, maybe fifty minutes ago,” Suzuki said, her voice tired. “The fire department got on their way and asked us to help provide a perimeter and extra hands, but…”

  She gestured helplessly at the wreckage of the library.

  “We couldn’t get past the heat or put the fire out, even temporarily,” she said quietly. “My son was in a class…”

  “My people evacuated everyone who was still in the building,” Damien told her. “They’re coordinating for medical assistance as we speak.”

  Suzuki nodded, inhaling a deep, almost sobbing breath.

  “We’re just a tourist town, my lord,” she whispered. “What happened?”

  “There were military-grade incendiary weapons deployed in the basement,” he replied. “We contained the explosion, but nothing was going to put that fire out.”

  “Why?”

  “That, Lieutenant Suzuki, is what I intend to find out,” Damien promised her. “I’ll have questions for you later, but if your son is still alive, he’ll be with the medics. Go check on him,” he told her gently. “I have a Marine clean-up team on their way.”

  Suzuki nodded, struggling against tears now, but headed off to check on her son.

  “This is insane,” Inspector Samara said, her voice shaky as she studied the wreckage.

  “This is overkill,” Damien replied. “I’m guessing there was some kind of backup archive in the bunker, but unless Miles Kessler is among the survivors, I don’t think we’re ever going to know for sure.”

  “This is Mars, sir,” Samara said. “What the hell is going on?”

  “I have a guess,” he said grimly. “And we’re going to need to go over every scrap of sensor data Romanov got in that basement. I need to know what type of incendiary was used—and, if we can, identify the source!”

  #

  Barely ten more minutes had passed before the sky filled with thunder as over a dozen RMMC assault shuttles dropped from orbit. A full MASH unit deployed and took over from the exhausted trio of fire department medics as Damien watched, and platoons of Marines, both exosuited and in regular combat armor, took up perimeter positions around the wrecked library.

  It took two Marine armorers five minutes after that to detach Romanov from his armor, the combination of literally walking in the incendiary mix and being at ground zero for an FAE rendering his suit basically nonfunctional.

  “This looks like a war zone, milord,” the battalion commander advised Damien.

  “I’ve seen worse,” the Hand replied, “but yes. I want the wreckage swept for any residue—I want to know what the damn weapon was.”

  “I already have a team on it,” Major Calliope replied. “My medics think most of the kids will pull through,” he added. “All of the younger ones, at least. The older ones were upstairs, someone said?”

  “Yeah.”

  Calliope shook his head.

  “Some might still make it,” he said hopefully. “Never expected to see kids tied up in this kind of mess. Not sure how the ones on the ground floor survived.”

  “Two very brave teachers,” Damien told him. “Backed the kids into a corner and took on the fire with handheld extinguishers until they were empty.”

  The Marine whistled.

  “Can I recruit them?”

  “No, though I’m planning on giving them medals.” The Hand shook his head. “We’ll have more MIS Forensics people here shortly,” he warned the Major. “We’re going to go through the ashes of that building with a fine-toothed comb, and I want full autopsies on the bodies.”

  “We can work with MIS,” the Major confirmed. “We’ll hold the perimeter until they’re done. What a gods-accursed mess.”

  “Agreed. Somewhere in there was one of yours, too,” Damien told him. “Ex–Marine Captain, Miles Kessler. Pretty sure he’s the body we’re missing.”

  “Damn. We’ll scan for a dog tag chip,” Calliope suggested. “He might have had his ident chip removed when he mustered out, but a lot of our old dogs keep them in to feel part of things still.”

  “If he died in there, I need to know,” Damien replied. “We were coming here to talk to him.”

  “What a gods-accursed mess,” the Marine repeated. “We’re going to need hazmat cleanup when the forensics team is done.”

  “I’ll leave that in the Marines’ hands. Can you make sure it happens? This town has had a bad-enough day.”

  “Oohrah, milord,” Calliope said firmly. “After a mess like this? The Corps will build them a new damned library.”

  “One way or another, the Mountain is paying to replace the library,” Damien agreed.

  #

  It took another twenty-four hours before the wreckage of the library cooled enough for the Marine teams to even enter the debris field. The fuel air explosion in the bunker had opened up the ground beneath the building and collapsed the entire structure into the crater, but it still hadn’t been enough to stop from burning the incendiary mix that had covered the library’s basement.

  Damien joined the Marines in the rapidly assembled campground on the streets and parks around the library. The entire area was locked down, with none of the civilians from the town allowed near as they dug their way in.

  “The good news,” Calliope finally told Damien, “is that Captain Kessler didn’t deactivate his ident chip when he mustered out. The bad news is that chip is definitely not inside the debris—at least, not active.”

  The Hand looked at the crater. Even now, parts of the wreckage were smoldering, but teams were picking through it in hazard gear.

  “What does it take to destroy one of those chips?” he asked.

  “They’re tough but not invulnerable,” the Major replied. “Being, say, in that bunker when the FAE went off would do it.”

  “What do we know about the bunker?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be there,” Samara replied, the MIS Inspector sitting cross-legged on a picnic table still incongruously in the middle of the Marines’ camp. “It’s not on the plans. Not on the work orders. None of the paperwork even suggests when or how they got the materials in.”

  The cop shook her head.

  “They did a damn good job of hiding it, my lord,” she told Damien. “At the same time, well”—she chuckled softly—“they built a small town a desperately needed library. Hard to see these folks as the bad guys.”

  “No one thinks what’s left are the bad guys, Inspector,” he replied. “So, they managed to add a bunker to it in secret? No idea what they had stored there?”

  She shrugged.

  “Like I said, my lord, I can’t even tell when they built it, let alone what they put in it,” she admitted. “I would guess, based off my briefings for this mess, a partial backup of the files at their Archive. You don’t build a nuclear suicide device into a data storage facility without a backup somewhere.”

  “Agreed. And where’s there one, there’s more,” Damien replied. “I need your team to find them. Preferably before the people who did this.” He gestured at the crater behind them.

  “Who has the resources to do something like this?” Romanov asked.

  “Any Mage,” Calliope replied. “Wouldn’t take much time for you to set this up, Mage-Captain.”

  Damien smiled to himself. No Marine was ever going to call Romanov Special Agent…or at least, if they did, it meant the seconded Marin
e had truly fucked up.

  “It wasn’t magic,” he pointed out. “Trust me on that.”

  It could have been—Calliope was right there—but Damien would have been able to tell. To a Rune Wright, a spell of that magnitude would have left traces. There was nothing here. This had been purely conventional, incendiaries and oxygen mixing in the contained space of the hidden bunker.

  “Well, if it was a weapon, we’ll find it,” the Marine promised. “Casings, chemical residues, all of that adds together. We’ll turn it over to Samara’s people and we will find out what happened.”

  The cross-legged woman’s computer buzzed, and she checked the holographic screen she had projected in front of her. She was silent for a moment, reading while the three men waited patiently.

  “Speaking of ‘my people,’” she finally said, looking up at Damien, “they just completed the first of the autopsies of the bodies you pulled out of the basement.”

  He nodded sharply. Assuming Miles Kessler had died in his bunker, eighteen adults and four teenagers had been killed. Those three, however, were the only ones he was sure had been dead before the fire.

  “My doctor’s best guess is that he was tortured,” Samara said softly. “All of the bones in his hands were broken, as were his shins and forearms. He was then shot in the head and the body left to be destroyed in the fire.”

  “Tortured for information,” Damien concluded. He grimaced. “So, it took them three tries to find someone who knew how to access the bunker. Fuckers.”

  “She says she can’t be certain,” the MIS Inspector continued, “but the style is consistent with Legatan intensive interrogation training.”

  The Hand was silent for a long time.

  “Check the other bodies from the basement,” he finally ordered. “Let me know if they’re the same. And identify the damn incendiary.”

  If it was Legatan…it was still only circumstantial evidence. But it connected two problems he’d thought were entirely separate.