“That was her name, was it? Meir?”
“Eleanor Meir. You didn’t even know her damned name?” Damien asked.
“Didn’t know shit. Fucker showed up with the right authentication codes for full command authority, then treated us like mushrooms. Go here, kill this person. Blew twenty years of pre-work.”
Twenty years. The Legatans had been moving against the Protectorate for twenty years. It was worse than Damien had been afraid of.
“What’s your name, soldier?”
“Major Adrian Kody,” the Legatan admitted. “Legatan Augment Corps. No point lying; you’ve got me wired up six ways to Sunday, and if you’ve taken any of men apart, you already knew that.”
“LMID?” Damien asked.
“Fuck me,” he said with a wince, but didn’t confirm or deny it.
“All right, Major Kody. What was your team even doing on Mars?”
“That’s classified,” Kody told Damien, then laughed, his chuckles rapidly degrading into coughing fits.
When the coughing faded, he shook his head.
“Water?”
Damien carefully filled a plastic cup and placed it in Kody’s hand. His fingers trembled weakly, but the cyborg managed to drink and then pass the cup back.
“Look, Montgomery,” he finally said. “I have no illusions that just the fact you took me alive means a lot of my government’s plans are about to blow up in their faces, but I swore an oath and I owe a duty. I’ll give you everything I know on Kay, but I won’t betray Legatus.”
“Fair enough,” Damien allowed. As Kody had admitted, he didn’t need the Augment to tell him much more than who he was—and anything the man gave him on this “Kay” could be hung on Legatus as well. “How about we start with who ‘Kay’ is?”
“I don’t actually know,” Kody replied. “I didn’t even know he was a Mage, though I knew he had to be associated with the people whose safehouses we were busting open—all too many of which were Mages.”
The cyborg shook his head.
“He showed up…two weeks past now. Had the identification codes, the passphrases, the encryption keys—everything he needed to prove that he was our new control.” Kody sighed. “I don’t even think they were faked or we were fooled. He got them from our commanders; he was legitimately our new control.
“His objectives were just…so far out of line from what I was expecting. I didn’t know why we’d be using Augments for the job, until the first time he sent us after a Mage. He had a lot of data on the people we were going after. He knew where the safehouses were, what the codes were… I presume they were some kind of undercover group, and he had to have been one of them.”
“Were you paying attention to the news?” Damien asked.
Kody stared blankly off into space for a moment, then chuckled—which again reduced him to coughing. Damien gave him the water again, and he slowly recovered.
“Shot in the fucking lung,” the Augment grumped. “Even your Mage healer can’t do much for that.”
He paused thoughtfully.
“I hadn’t put together the pieces,” he admitted. “Should have. The odds that someone else was going around wiping out the survivors of a covert conspiracy were pretty low, huh?”
“Yeah. You were taking down the Keepers. Far too damned successfully for my tastes.”
“That’s life,” the Legatan Major said bluntly. “We aren’t friends, Montgomery. I may not like Kay or what he asked me to do, but he had the right codes to give me orders, which means my bosses signed off on it and I’ll shed no tears for your troubles.”
How many of the galaxy’s problems, Damien wondered, would be solved if people didn’t blindly follow orders?
“And then he teleported out and left you to face a Hand,” Damien concluded. “Any idea where he’d have gone?”
“From what he’d said, he had a ship in orbit,” Kody replied. “He’d have teleported up there and fled the system. He’s long gone, Montgomery. At least if he’s got half a brain, anyway, and much as I hate the bastard’s guts, he might have been the smartest man I’ve ever met.”
The blinded Augment shook his head.
“You aren’t going to catch him. But I got a bone to throw you, if you’ve anything to offer me.”
Damien smiled grimly.
“Right now, Major, you can’t even see,” he pointed out. “I can easily claim necessity and leave your implants disabled. I don’t need to call in those cybernetics experts to help us get you functional without being a threat.”
Kody coughed.
“Like you said, we aren’t friends,” Damien echoed.
“Fair,” Kody admitted. “Should have known better than to fuck with Darth Montgomery. Kay had the codes but I didn’t trust him. I checked him out. I know where his apartment was.”
Ignoring the blatant attempt to push his buttons, Damien leaned forward.
“Address, Major, and we’ll see about getting at least some of your implants back online,” he promised. “If you’re cooperative.”
“I’ll play nice,” the Legatan told him. “If I’m going to spend the rest of my life in a Martian cell, I’d like to at least be able to see.”
#
Chapter 26
The apartment was in Asimov, a city at the almost exact opposite side of the planet from Olympus Mons. It was a smaller city, built around an air and space transit hub that primarily moved the products of the agricultural fields that stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction around it.
Like any city, it had long grown beyond its original single industry with malls and lawyers and blocks of apartments for the low- and mid-wage employees who kept the service industries running. There were also nicer condo and apartment buildings for the higher-wage employees, but the address that Kody gave Damien didn’t take them to one of those buildings.
The building “Kay” had been based out of was a rundown ten-story apartment building that looked like it dated back to the original colonization, built of concrete with smaller windows and obvious marks where airlocks had been changed out for normal doors.
They landed the assault shuttle at the nearest police station, trying to not be overly obvious, and were met by a trio of worried-looking women in black police uniforms.
“I am Lieutenant Jeanette Wong,” the front woman told Damien. “We weren’t warned you were coming, my lord; how may we assist you?”
“Hopefully, we won’t need you to do much,” he told her with a smile. “I’ll need to borrow vehicles for myself and a detail of ten, six of them in exosuit armor.”
Wong blinked in surprise but nodded slowly.
“We have a van for our tactical team that should fit six in exosuits,” she said after a moment. “We can lend you a couple of unmarked squad cars as well, but the van is marked.”
“That will do nicely,” he replied. “I apologize for dropping in on you without prior warning, Lieutenant. The situation we are dealing with is fluid, and I’m not sure of the level of danger to the surrounding area.
“I will need you to be standing by for potential evacuations,” he continued. “I hope not to need you, but the risk is present.”
Kay had so far proven willing to accept massive collateral damage in pursuit of his objectives. Damien expected there to be some kind of suicide or self-destruct in the apartment. He was just hoping they could disarm it.
Wong looked uncomfortable.
“My lord, this is a quiet precinct in a quiet city,” she said slowly. “I only have about thirty officers on duty and maybe a hundred more I can call up. How large of an evacuation are we talking?”
“At least one apartment building, more likely the entire block,” Damien told her. “Call in officers from other precincts if you need them, Lieutenant; you have my authority for that.”
She nodded.
“How long do I have, my lord?”
“We’re moving out straight away,” he said gently. “If I’m reading the navigation software correctly, fifteen
minutes?”
Wong swallowed.
“I’ll have Sergeant Lindt here show you the vehicles, then,” she said, gesturing at one of the women following her forward, “while I go call my fellow precinct heads.”
#
The apartment building didn’t look any better in person than it had in the pictures or as they flew over. It was a bleak structure that radiated a hopelessness Damien wasn’t used to feeling in the cities of Mars, a generally wealthy planet with a capable safety net.
Arriving in three police vehicles didn’t even appear to draw attention from the sparse crowds other than a clear, if subtle, growing distance between the marked van and the scattered individuals on the pathways.
That retreat became far more obvious when Romanov’s exosuited Marines exited the tactical van. This was a rundown area used to seeing cops…but it was still a quiet city. Even if it hadn’t been, exosuits weren’t a tool used by police—they were designed for space boardings and major battles, not arrests and traffic control.
The streets emptied and Damien shook his head as they approached the doors to the apartment building.
“He probably isn’t here,” he told his detail, “but let’s be sure he doesn’t make it out if he is. Romanov, have your people cover the exits. If you see the bastard, ping me before you engage,” he ordered. “We don’t want any of you going head to head with a Combat Mage without myself or Romanov backing you up, clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
A wave of the golden hand of Damien’s office over the door panel opened the locks. The small icon contained electronics that could, in theory, override every electronic system in the Protectorate. Their actual reach was not quite that complete but was still terrifying to anyone aware of it.
“Sixth floor,” he noted. “Watch the elevator, but I think we’re taking the stairs.”
If nothing else, very few elevators were rated to pack in multiple exosuits.
Damien left checking for technological traps to the capable sensors in his bodyguards’ armor and reached out with his own unique senses, looking for magical artifacts, traps or other surprises. There was nothing in the stairwell, at least.
“The building security cameras have been penetrated,” Romanov warned him. “By…well, probably every person with less-than-good intentions in a ten-kilometer radius. These systems are not secure.
“Relevant to our interests, though, is that a live feed is being run to a secondary system in the apartment we’re heading to.”
“Can we spoof it?”
“Already done,” the Marine replied. “The shunt was run with Corps software, though,” he warned. “Absolute top-of-the-line stuff.”
“I’m not surprised,” Damien told him. “I’m not sure who this ‘Kay’ is, but he is definitely a Combat Mage, which leads me to assume Marine.”
“There are other people who train Combat Mages,” Romanov pointed out. Then he sighed. “Of course, the Marines train the best Combat Mages, so you’re probably right.”
There were no surprises until they reached the sixth floor, but Damien stopped as they were about to exit the stairwell, studying a new feeling in the air.
“Wait,” he ordered.
He looked around. He could feel magic, but he couldn’t see anything immediate. Studying the door leading into the sixth floor, he made sure it was clear, then moved his Sight across the wall.
“Here. Romanov, can you cut the wall open along these lines?” Damien drew a rough square on the wall with his own magic, turning the concrete black.
“Done.” The deadly blade concealed in the exosuit’s arm served well for rough-and-ready demolition work, and the chunk of wall easily slid out into Damien’s hands.
At some point, the wall had been hollowed out from the other side, and the piece of wall he now held had been inlaid with silver runes—runes woven into a spell that was confused by its movement but still functional.
Damien studied it, tracing its lines of power and then shivering slightly as he concluded its purpose.
“Subtle,” he noted. “This is looking for someone in an exosuit to go down the hallway on the other side of the door.”
“I guess he figured Marines would come after him eventually,” Romanov noted. “What does it do if it finds an exosuit?”
“Disintegrates everything in the corridor,” the Hand said shortly. “Exosuits, unarmored companions, any poor neighbors who happen to be in the way…gone.”
With a slash of power, he carefully severed six key connections, disabling the spell and safely releasing the energy it contained.
“Not going to happen,” he continued. “But let’s move very carefully as we go further. This was a nasty piece of work, and I’m betting it was only his first line of defense.”
#
The hallway itself proved safe to traverse, with the strange Mage not having left any traps that interfered with his neighbors’ lives. The apartment wasn’t an end or corner unit, either, which appeared to have prevented Kay from setting up any more traps.
It was the middle unit on the north side, and as soon as Damien reached the door and began to study it, he knew they had a problem.
Magic had been woven across the interior of the door and onto the walls, a floor-to-ceiling network of runic chains that encased the entire apartment in a solid shell of magic that must have taken months of painstaking work, likely done over years and years, to establish.
“This was not a temporary safehouse,” Damien said quietly. “I think the entire outer shell of the unit is covered in runes—warning, fire, disintegration. If we open the door without the right token, the entire unit explodes. If we break the rune matrix anywhere else…” He studied the magic as best as he could without being able to see the runes, then shook his head.
“If we break the runes anywhere else, the entire unit explodes,” he concluded. “I can’t be sure how badly, but I’m guessing the building wouldn’t survive.”
“It’s an old building; they built them tough,” Romanov pointed out.
“I was allowing for that,” Damien replied. “We’re talking barely sub-nuclear level explosion. Putting this together took a long time and a lot of skill. Less skill, but more time, if someone else wrote the matrix and the Mage doing the work was following instructions.”
He shook his head.
“Breaking down the door or coming in through the balcony aren’t options,” he concluded. “I want whatever is inside this apartment intact, which means I don’t want it turning into a goddamn bomb.”
“So, we can go no further?” Samara asked, the Inspector studying the plain-looking door. “Even if we were to give up on this investigation here, it sounds like this bomb is not something we can safely leave for others to discover by accident.”
“It’s not,” Damien agreed. “But I can’t disarm it without be able to actually see the runes. The spell is linked to some kind of physical token, I think. Without it, I’m not sure we can get in safely at all.”
“Would he have come here after fleeing the Keeper safehouse?” Samara asked. “Could he have teleported directly here?”
“The token wouldn’t register from inside the teleport,” Damien said absently as he stared at the runes. “He probably went straight to orbit.”
“So, he would have to teleport to the hallway and come through the door?” Romanov asked.
“Or would the spell check for the token once he was inside?” Samara said.
Damien looked up at his companions and chuckled.
“That kind of check is complicated,” he told them. “It can only do it when the matrix is activated by, say, having the door opened. So, either he would have to teleport to here and go through the door, or…”
“This defense might not stop a teleportation spell,” Samara concluded.
“There might be other defenses for that instance,” he warned. “But it’s our best shot.” He shook his head. “That said, I think we’re going to need that evacuation we had Wong p
reparing for. I might be able to survive this going off if I’m ready for it, but the neighborhood won’t.”
#
Chapter 27
Four hours later, with a police perimeter set up two blocks out and every living thing in that radius evacuated, Damien Montgomery teleported into the center of the apartment safehouse. He froze, remaining completely still as he wrapped the most powerful shields he could conjure around himself.
Nothing happened.
When nothing continued to happen, he released a breath and took a look around. He nonetheless kept most of his body very still as he swept the plain living room with his Sight, seeking the traps and defenses he was almost certain were there.
There was nothing. The outside defenses remained and he could see the silver inlay of the runes that covered every exterior wall of the apartment, but the interior was empty. No runes. No technological traps registered by the scanner harness Romanov had insisted on.
Nothing.
He stood in the middle of a cheaply furnished apartment, with furniture of the type that inevitably had Swedish names. A small kitchenette occupied one side, sliding doors—with silver runes etched into the glass—led to a small balcony and an open door led into a similarly furnished bedroom.
If it wasn’t for the runes he could see etched on the walls, the apartment would have been completely mundane.
Now, at least, Damien could actually see the runes themselves, not just feel the flow through the walls. Kay had clearly known Damien was a Rune Wright, but now Damien wondered if that had been accounted for when he’d built this safehouse.
No one except a Rune Wright would have been able to detect the defenses from outside. It was even possible that the Keepers didn’t realize that a Rune Wright could do that; it wasn’t an aspect of his abilities that even most of his fellow Hands were aware of.
If Kay hadn’t known that, then he might have assumed that even Damien would try to come through the door when they hadn’t detected any technological traps—and without proper preparation, the spell matrix that currently surrounded him could easily have killed him.
Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5) Page 19