Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Even the admin tower lacks gravity,” Matthews warned. “The bridge and top few floors have magical grav, but most of the rest is zero-gee.”

  “Are we going to be in the zone with the runes?”

  “Should be.”

  “Good to know,” Denis said dryly. Whether or not they had gravity changed a lot.

  The ship had a stark kind of beauty from the outside. It was purely functional, with the massive rotating artificial-gravity rings around the outside, and several smaller ones tucked away in various sections of the facility, where some kind of “down” would be needed for either the refining process or the humans themselves.

  Lights glowed all over it. It was literally a city in space, though it was home to only a handful of people relative to its size. The massive battleships that stood guard over Mars were heavier, but with their super-dense armor and carefully condensed designs, they were actually significantly smaller than the massive spacegoing structure around him.

  “There’s the airlock,” the engineer told them as they finally came close enough to see it. “I can’t raise the Captain,” she warned them. “The suit’s radio is short range, but I should have got her from there…”

  “Understood,” Denis replied. At this point, even taking the bridge wouldn’t be enough to achieve victory for the pirates, but it would certainly make his task harder if Captain Gambon was dead.

  #

  Despite the painful acceleration Damien was putting her through, Doctor Akintola was still growing farther and farther away from Callisto. Her velocity was shrinking, but they were still almost half an hour away from reaching zero velocity relative to the refinery ship, let alone getting back to her.

  “I can’t raise Captain Gambon,” Samara told him quietly. “She’s been checking in every few minutes since we drove the pirates off, but I haven’t been able to get in touch for at least five minutes. It’s been almost ten since we spoke.”

  “Damn,” he said. “What was the last you heard from her?”

  “Life support was being pressed but the bridge was quiet,” the inspector replied.

  “That’s what I thought. Wanted to be sure.”

  The Hand studied the diagram of Callisto and glanced at the simulacrum floating above him. In many ways, he’d almost be better off if the ship were farther away. He could teleport Doctor Akintola using the simulacrum, but the minimum distance he could easily manage was a light-hour.

  Jumping a starship was also subject to significant risks from gravity. He could jump the ship from there, but it would be unpleasant and risky. Of course, the matrix just scaled up a smaller spell…

  “Romanov,” he pinged the Mage-Captain. “We’ve lost touch with the bridge. Are you in contact?”

  “Negative,” the Marine replied. “The life-support attack has been cut down to a holding action, too. We’re making an exterior approach to the bridge, but we have no comms with Captain Gambon at all.”

  “Damn.”

  “We’re only a few minutes out, my lord,” Romanov told him. “We’ll be there soon.”

  “Understood.”

  Damien looked over at Samara.

  “Ten minutes, huh?”

  “At most. At least five, though.”

  He nodded absently while plugging numbers into Akintola’s computer. Two sets of calculations ran side by side, one for the ship’s course and one for the exact distance and relative velocity to Callisto’s bridge.

  Grimly, Damien unstrapped himself from the chair and wove magic around himself to resist the five gravities that had been pressing him down.

  “There’s a program in the computer that will bring Akintola back to Callisto on its own,” he told Samara. “Should bring to a zero-velocity rendezvous at about fifty klicks’ distance.”

  “Aren’t you flying us?” The MIS Inspector was looking at him like he was crazy, and he smiled grimly at her.

  “The ship can fly itself for that, and minutes might make all the difference for Captain Gambon,” he explained. “I’ll see you in a few hours, Inspector Samara.”

  Before the woman could say anything more, he read the second set of numbers on the command chair’s screen and stepped.

  He teleported directly from one bridge to another, but Callisto’s bridge was a very different affair from Doctor Akintola’s. The yacht’s bridge was a gorgeous affair, a simulacrum chamber surrounded by the view of the stars and equipped with the latest in luxuries and electronics.

  The refinery ship’s bridge resembled a military command center, with four rows of monitors and consoles filling a room more concerned with running the refinery’s operations than actually flying the ship.

  At the back of the room was a raised area where the Captain could look down over everyone else’s shoulders, though it was distinctly too far back for the Captain to be able to see details of what anyone was doing.

  A dozen men in black fatigues had formed a rough firing line along the front of that dais, their assault rifles pointing at the refinery’s command crew to keep them back. Behind them, an unusually tall and pale man, obviously space-born, stood with a gun trained on the heavyset form of Captain Gambon.

  The woman was on the ground, already injured, as she glared up at the man threatening her.

  Damien threw a shield of force across her as the man, apparently the leader of the attackers, looked up in shock at his arrival.

  “I’d recommend you put the gun down and surrender, but the evidence suggests you’re not the surrendering type,” the Hand told him.

  “What the fuck? Who in the Stone and Void are you?” the man demanded.

  “I am Hand Damien Montgomery,” Damien told him. “And your only chance of living through this is to drop that gun and talk very, very quickly.”

  “Fuck you. Take him!”

  A dozen assault rifles blazed to life, bullets hammering into the shield of force Damien had raised in front of himself as well.

  “I’m not sure how many people you’ve killed today,” Damien admitted. “I’m prepared to leave that to a conventional court to assess if you surrender. I’ll even promise your lives if you lay down your guns.”

  The Protectorate used the death penalty only in extreme cases, but piracy and mass murder were on the short list of crimes that could get it dusted off.

  “The Belt has listened to the lies of Mars for too long! We will be free.”

  The speaker yanked his jacket open, revealing that he was wearing an explosive vest. A quick glance at his men suggested at least half had the same accessory.

  “Everyone in this room dies when I hit the button. What do you say to that, Hand Montgomery?”

  “I haven’t met many who regard death as freedom,” Damien said. “There’s been enough death today, I think. We can talk about this, Mister…”

  “Go to hell!”

  The gun in the terrorist’s hand barked, the bullets smashing away from Captain Gambon as Damien tightened his shield around her. Tossing the weapon aside, he suddenly charged at the Hand with the detonator in his hand.

  Despite everything, Damien actually tried to stop the detonator. He had neither enough time nor enough familiarity with the vest the man was wearing to manage it, but he tried.

  He didn’t account for the fact that the detonator would also trigger the other men’s vests. Seven sets of explosives went off in one cacophonous blast and he’d shielded only Callisto’s crew.

  By the time Romanov’s people broke through the bridge hatch two minutes later, all of the pirates were dead.

  #

  “Keep pressure on that,” Romanov instructed, stepping up to where Damien was treating Captain Gambon’s wound. The woman had passed out from blood loss, but he was reasonably sure she was going to make it.

  “I know that much first aid,” the Hand replied. “Tape and gauze, if you want to be helpful.”

  The Special Agent chuckled but obeyed, handing Damien the supplies he needed to finish binding the ugly wound in the woman’
s leg.

  “She’ll live; I did some light cauterization,” Damien told Romanov. He glanced up at the shocked-looking bridge crew. “I presume there is a doctor somewhere on this ship?”

  “We have an emergency clinic,” one of the crew responded. He’d been standing a little too close to where the suicide bombers had blown their vests and was slowly and shakily wiping blood off of his face. Damien’s shield had absorbed the blast and the force, but some of the…debris had still ended up all over the room.

  “Can you get a doctor up here ASAP?” the Hand instructed. “The Captain will need real attention as soon as possible, though I imagine there’ll be a lot of demand for their services today.”

  Rising, he met Romanov’s gaze and jerked his head over to one side.

  “Have your people secured the life support section and Engineering?” he asked.

  “We have,” Romanov confirmed. “No casualties on our side, not least thanks to engineer Matthews’ help.”

  The exosuited trooper gestured to a woman in an EVA suit. She was carrying her helmet while trying to coordinate something out of the confused and traumatized bridge crew.

  “Why do you need bodyguards again?” the Secret Service agent asked, surveying the wreckage of the room. “Seems like you handled this without us.”

  “In my defense, they blew themselves up this time,” Damien replied. “And I can only be in one place at a time and… Well, one generally prefers not to start with the most powerful weapon in the arsenal. Just in case, say, someone needs to teleport to a specific room to stop the bastards killing the ship’s captain.”

  Romanov chuckled.

  “True enough.” The chuckle turned to a sigh. “No prisoners, boss. Only these buggers blew themselves up, but the rest fought to the death.”

  “I don’t know about this supposed Belt Liberation Front Samara linked them to,” Damien told him, “but that seems out of character for any kind of movement in Sol.

  “For that matter, I wasn’t aware that we had any kind of resistance movements at all in the Solar System, and that should have crossed my radar,” the Hand continued. “I want to talk to Captain Gambon when she wakes up. This might be something unique to her ship, or…”

  “Something bigger.”

  “Something bigger,” Damien agreed quietly, making sure no one on the bridge could hear. “Something, perhaps, Legatan.”

  #

  Chapter 15

  Callisto was a ship of sufficient size that she actually had docking ports for smaller vessels like Doctor Akintola. Once the yacht was close enough, Damien linked in to her by remote control, flying her the last few kilometers to latch the ship on and allow them to connect the two spaceships.

  Samara and Christoffsen strode off the ship together, both managing to look concerned and furious at the same time. The MIS Inspector was going to fit right in, Damien concluded.

  “The ship is secure,” he told them. “Romanov’s people and AMS’s security team is sweeping for any remaining pirates, but the sensors aren’t showing any.”

  “I take it from Dr. Christoffsen’s resigned expression that this sort of temporary insanity on your part is normal?” Samara asked.

  “I wouldn’t call it insanity myself,” Damien replied, “but…yes. There are often circumstances where only I have the authority, power, or simply ability to intervene in a timely manner. I would not be doing my job were I not to do so.”

  “And who does your job if you die, my lord Hand?”

  “There remain nine other Hands, despite the events of the last few weeks,” Damien told her. “I am…valuable. Not irreplaceable.”

  She looked at Christoffsen.

  “Is he always this dumb?”

  “Yes,” the Professor agreed instantly. “Smart, powerful, politically connected…but dumb. I talked to his college girlfriend when we were in Sherwood. He hasn’t changed much.”

  “I knew letting Grace anywhere near my staff was a bad idea,” Damien said with a sigh. “I try not to be actively stupid, Inspector Samara, but my job requires a significant amount of personal risk. I take these risks so others, less capable, don’t have to.

  “Had I not intervened, Captain Gambon would be dead. Instead, she is going to live. The doctors say she should wake up sometime in the next few hours and be well enough for at least a conversation, if not heavy questioning.”

  “She’s hardly at fault here,” Samara pointed out.

  “No,” Damien agreed. “But my impression is that the Belt Liberation Front was not regarded as a serious threat—certainly not a serious-enough threat for me to be briefed on. And yet they pulled together twenty armed ships and a hundred-person boarding party to assault an extremely valuable spaceship.

  “I’m hoping there may be some particular reason the Captain is aware of as to why they came after Callisto,” he concluded. “My hopes are not high. Did you pull what files we have on the BLF?”

  He hadn’t asked, the thought having occurred to him only then.

  “I requested the full file from the MIS on Mars shortly after you decided to teleport off the bridge,” she replied. “We received them just before I arrived. I haven’t had time to review them in detail, but…there’s not much there, my lord.”

  “I don’t suppose any of it links to the Friends of Hellas Montes or the Grand Eagle’s Circle?” he asked with a sigh.

  “No, my lord. That was the first thing I checked,” she admitted.

  “If only things were so simple. Shall we go look at your files while we wait for the good Captain to wake up?”

  #

  “I’m not sure what you expect me to be able to tell you, my lord,” Captain Gambon admitted from the bed.

  The bed—the entire room, for that matter—was familiar to Damien. The Charter required a certain minimum medical care for the citizens of humanity’s worlds, and one of the ways the Protectorate enabled that was by using the purchasing power of a multi-system government to make certain standardized medical equipment very, very cheap for the system governments.

  Most clinic rooms in the entire Protectorate looked much the same because of that.

  “I don’t know either,” Damien told her with a chuckle. “These assholes seemed to be from the Belt Liberation Front, but our intel says that the BLF doesn’t have the numbers, the gear, or the money for this kind of stunt—let alone the fanatics willing to fight to the death!”

  Gambon sighed.

  “I can’t speak to specifics, but I can say you lot seriously underestimate them,” she warned. “I’m Belt-born, Hand Montgomery. I hear the complaints, the problems.”

  “I didn’t think things were that bad in Sol’s Belt,” Damien said.

  “They’re not,” Gambon replied. “But they aren’t perfect, either. Asteroid belts are hard places to make a living. Hard places. It’s easy to look at that and think you’ve got it worse off than everyone else. Especially when you’re in Sol, and every damned planet seems to be full of the lazy and the rich.”

  “There can’t be many who’d think that being somehow liberated would help,” Samara pointed out.

  “There aren’t,” the refinery ship captain agreed. “But there’s some. They don’t have a goal; they’re just striking out at anyone they see as having hurt them.”

  “Five million people in Sol’s Belt,” Damien concluded. “It doesn’t take much to come up with a couple of hundred nihilistic fanatics out of five million people.”

  “No,” Gambon said. “But your friends with the intel are right too. They might have had the manpower and the fanatics for this stunt, but they don’t have gear and they don’t have money. Might be…five hundred folks across the Belt who’d buy into their drivel enough to die for it, but without ships, guns and money, they can’t do anything.”

  “They clearly got all three of those things.”

  “I don’t know how,” Gambon replied. “We’re talking the kinds of folk who drift from ship to ship, working for whatever Captain n
eeds a spare hand this month to put food in their mouths. They don’t have money. They don’t have ships. They’d need some kind of sponsor—and who’s going to sponsor a bunch of idiots?”

  “Sadly, I can think of a few people.” Damien sighed. “I don’t suppose you knew any of them?”

  “I wish. I’d be calling their damned mothers.”

  “Fair enough. Thank you, Captain Gambon. I was hoping for something more actionable, but you provided some clarity I think we needed.”

  “Those assholes killed over a hundred of my crew, Hand Montgomery. Anything I can do to help you bring them down, I’m in.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he told her. “Right now, however, I think your doctor is about to kick us out, so we will gracefully exit before she has to get rude.” He rose and offered Gambon his hand. “Thank you again, Captain.”

  #

  “None of this adds up,” Samara told Damien as they left the clinic. “They might have a few fanatics available, but the resources had to come from somewhere, and the Front just plain doesn’t have them.”

  The Hand glanced around the hallway, then put a finger to his lips. Callisto might have a small crew for her size, with most of her key processes automated, but a large portion of that crew was hovering around the clinic right now, either in for treatment or waiting to hear on friends who were in.

  The pair of dark-suited Secret Service agents accompanying him and the MIS Inspector were giving them some space, but not enough for that discussion.

  “There are sources,” he half-whispered. “But it’s not something we can discuss here. We need to return to Akintola and get back on our way to Ceres.”

  “How late are we?” the Inspector asked after a moment’s thought and a glance at the strangers around them.

  “Late,” Damien said. “We were supposed to already be there. Hell, my meeting with the Council was three hours ago now. Without the velocity we sacrificed to get here, we’re still six hours away, but…”