Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  “It doesn’t matter, Councilor,” Damien whispered. “We can all stand together, weave the powers of forty Mages—hell, Alexander himself could be standing here and we could not turn this aside.”

  Even from the Olympus Mons Simulacrum on Mars, he couldn’t have turned aside the oncoming ship.

  “You said it had to be automated,” Constable Lucas said aloud. “Can you…move Council Station?”

  A moment of hope flared through Damien as he looked back at the projection, studying it, but then it faded as he shook his head.

  “We could,” he admitted. “But not enough—not when the ship is accelerating at fifty gravities. Unless the people who coded it were fools, it will adjust unless we move much farther than we could.”

  If the station had an amplifier matrix, he could jump them all…

  He looked at the Runes of Power on his arms. At their core, they were same type of magic. He’d only ever run his own magic through them, through the cascading sequence of feedback loops carved across his flesh. It wasn’t enough to bring his own power to a level where he could teleport a kilometer-wide station with no runes in it, but with forty Mages…

  “You have an idea,” Ayodele recognized. “We have no time, Montgomery. No second chances. What do you need us to do?”

  “Give me your power,” he told them. “As if you were pouring it into a jump matrix…pour it into me.”

  From the Earth Councilor’s expression, he knew enough about just what Damien was and could do to guess what he meant.

  “I have studied His Majesty’s Gift,” Ayodele whispered. “I don’t know if you’ll survive that.”

  “One life for many, Councilor,” he whispered back. “I chose a duty. I swore an oath.”

  He strode into the middle of the Council Chamber, facing the growing spark of light that was going to crush them all, and reached out for the power the Mages around him freely gave.

  Power flowed through the room in a way he’d never seen before as he dragged it through the air, channeling every ounce of strength and will and Gift the Councilors could spare for him and feeding it into his Runes.

  They were warm enough when he acted. He could feel his clothes ignite over the Runes and the shocked gasps around him, but he had to focus. Pain was shunted aside. Heat was shunted aside.

  Everything was shunted aside except the station beneath his feet and the power he was channeling into the runes on his skin.

  Again and again the power tore through the feedback loops, doubling and tripling as he ran the power of forty Mages through an artifice designed not only for just one Mage but for one specific Mage.

  It wasn’t enough, but the gravity runes were touching his feet and he struck at them, draining their power as he encased Council Station in a bubble of his will.

  He had no simulacrum. No runes or connections to channel his power.

  Just his will, his Gift, and the power he was given.

  He focused everything into a single searing moment and stepped.

  He had enough time to see the spark of light he’d been watching change as Ceres shrank from filling the entire screen to a tiny orb a million kilometers distant.

  Then the pain exploded through him and Damien Montgomery fell into darkness.

  #

  Chapter 39

  Damien woke up.

  Waking from black-out unconsciousness was becoming a disturbingly common experience for him, though the splitting migraine and searing pain in his forearms were new. It took him a moment to be sure that, yes, he could open his eyes and see; it was just that the room was dark.

  “You, my young friend, are far too cavalier with your own skin,” the familiar, if tired, voice of the Mage-King of Mars said in the darkness. “Your eyes need a few moments; they, um…exploded.”

  “That bad?” Damien asked.

  “Your forearm Runes are…gone,” Alexander said quietly. “Your eardrums exploded. You bled through your eyeballs, destroying them almost completely. Your left lung failed and your heart stopped beating on at least two occasions.”

  “Fuck.” No wonder he hurt.

  “And to be clear, you melted the silver out of your arms,” the King pointed out. “You almost lost your left arm. You would have if I’d been any further away. You owe Councilor Ayodele your life, Damien. He was the only Mage-Surgeon on Council Station.

  “If he hadn’t been here and placed you into magical suspension, you would have died.”

  “Will I heal?” Damien asked.

  “I’ve rebuilt your eyes and your eardrums,” his ruler told him. “Ayodele is a better Healer than I am, but I have more power. Combined, we managed to fix your lung and save your arms.”

  The room was silent for a moment.

  “But the Runes are gone,” Damien echoed.

  “And the scar tissue is…ugly,” Alexander admitted. “Your glove habit is going to have another purpose for a while. I…” He sighed. “It might be possible, between you and me, to restore your Runes. But that’s a question for another day, once everything has healed more completely.

  “For now, you only have three Runes of Power,” the King told him. He sighed. “I wish I could say you shouldn’t have done it.”

  “How many people are on this station, my liege?”

  “Over seventeen thousand. Eight hundred died in the attack, but there are over sixteen thousand people left alive who would have died with you had you done nothing.”

  “I knew the risks,” Damien replied. “Painful death in exchange for sixteen thousand innocent lives was a trade I was prepared to make.” He chuckled softly.

  “Would you have done anything different, my King?”

  “No.” Alexander sighed. “We managed to capture Texas Poker,” he admitted. “All of her crew were still aboard. It’s…not possible for us to tell if any of them were dead when the ship started her charge.”

  Fifty gravities for an extended period wouldn’t leave the bodies in an autopsiable state.

  “Inspector Samara’s assessment is that the ship was boarded, the bridge was captured, and then whoever set the program teleported off,” he concluded.

  “The modus operandi is familiar,” Damien said. “Kay. Or Nemesis. Or whoever the fuck the son of a bitch is.”

  “He covered his tracks well. Texas Poker wouldn’t have survived the impact, but her surveillance cameras were destroyed and wiped anyway.”

  “My Warrant was to pursue him,” Damien said determinedly. “I will keep pursuing him.”

  “That Warrant has been given to Munira Samara now,” Alexander told him. “I have another task for you, Damien Montgomery, if you’re fit for it.”

  “My head feels like someone took an ax to it and my hands feel like they’ve been dipped in molten silver,” Damien replied. “But I am your man, to the end. You know that.”

  “I’m going to turn the lights on and call in a doctor,” the Mage-King of Mars told him. “Once he’s cleared you, your people are waiting. Let them know you’re all right, Damien. Miss Samara seems especially concerned.

  “Once that’s done,” Alexander’s voice turned grim, “it remains necessary for me to appear before the Council. I have insisted that you be with me.”

  “My liege?” Damien asked slowly.

  “You will see, Damien Montgomery. I will not permit what has happened to go unremarked, to the good or the ill.

  “We will have work to do.”

  #

  Alexander had left the room by the time the lights were fully on, and Damien, blinking against the pain in his repaired eyes, finally looked at his hands and forearms. The sight caused him to inhale sharply, setting off a cascade of pain throughout his body that forced him to close his eyes again.

  Breathing slowly, he forced himself to open his eyes again and look at the ruin he’d made of himself.

  From the elbow down on both arms, his skin was blackened and twisted. He could tell that it was already partly healed, vast amounts of magic having been pour
ed into his flesh to keep anything intact, but his arms looked more like lightning-struck branches than human skin.

  He tried to move his hand, only to find himself whimpering in pain, which distracted him from the door opening and someone else entering the room.

  “Damien.”

  Dr. Vinh Nguyen looked down at him with an unreadable expression on his face.

  “I prefer to see my patients on a more irregular basis than this,” he said softly. “His Majesty and Councilor Ayodele saved your life and your eyes, but…even they couldn’t do much for your arms but halt the damage sufficiently to preserve your limbs.

  “I…” Nguyen sighed. “I’m not sure it was worth it,” he admitted. “Try and make a fist for me.”

  Damien’s fingers twitched, the blackened claws barely twitching toward each other. Nguyen shook his head and held out a plastic cup.

  “Grab this,” he instructed.

  Damien managed, barely, to wrap his uncooperative fingers around the cup and get a grip on it. He could tell that even the slightest problem would cause him to drop it.

  “His Majesty saved the tendons in your arms,” Nguyen told him as he took the cup away. “But they were badly damaged. Reconstruction and regeneration of muscle and tendon is not a straightforward process and is definitively not one where sheer power can make a difference.”

  Damien blinked back tears of pain, staring at the ruins of his hands.

  “Will I ever—”

  “Recover full function? No,” the doctor said flatly. “Partial function, yes. Rapidly, actually. In a month or so, you’ll be able to hold a glass or cup without too many problems. Give us six months to a year, and you’ll probably be able to use a computer or fire a gun again.

  “Both…may require modification of the hardware,” Nguyen admitted. “You will never have full dexterity in your fingers again.

  “It’s rarely something I would recommend, but I’m not certain that amputation and cybernetic replacement isn’t the best option here,” he continued.

  “What about the Runes?” Damien asked. Cybernetic replacement would cause issues with the remaining ones, but given how many he’d lost…

  Nguyen sighed.

  “I’m…probably the closest thing there is to an expert on the interaction of Runes of Power and the human body,” he noted. “Your interface runes, your projector rune, and the Runes of Power on your forearms were destroyed. The polymer melted and ran into your flesh. There are still fragments of silver embedded throughout your arms. There always will be.”

  He shook his head.

  “I believe you could safely restore your interface runes and likely the projector rune,” Nguyen told him. “I… am not certain your body would tolerate the strain of those Runes of Power again.”

  “And we couldn’t mount them on cybernetics,” Damien pointed out.

  “So far as I understand, no,” the doctor agreed. “I will give you something for the pain,” he continued, “but I would warn that even that will only reduce over time. Your arms will always hurt now.

  “You badly damaged your body, Damien. The consequences of that will walk with you for the rest of your life. Neither I nor the Mage-King nor every doctor in the Protectorate combined could heal you entirely now.”

  Damien sighed and nodded.

  “Then I’ll live with it,” he said, his voice breaking as more pain wracked his body. “One way or another.”

  “Fortunately, you still possess magic that will assist you in the fine manipulation your hands are no longer capable of,” the doctor continued. “I would recommend practicing both magical manipulation and voice control of computers for the near future. Becoming reliant on those tools risks your long-term recovery, but…”

  Nguyen shook his head sadly.

  “You’ll need to do it anyway,” he concluded. “Wherever duty takes you from here, Damien, I suggest you take the best physiotherapists you can find with you. You’re going to need them.”

  If his Warrant had been given to Samara…

  “I’m not sure where I go from here, Doctor,” Damien admitted.

  “I doubt his Majesty intends to leave you on the sidelines for long,” Nguyen replied. “Honestly, I’d rather lock you in the Mountain for a year and hover over your damned hands myself, but I suspect we need you for more than that.”

  He stepped up to Damien with a hypodermic, pressing it to the injured Mage’s shoulder.

  “This is as much as I can give you for the pain right now,” he noted. “There are clothes in the other room. I can have one of my nurses help you dress…”

  “No,” Damien told him. “If I must to learn to dress with magic, then I may as well start now.”

  “I’m sorry, Damien,” Nguyen whispered. “I wish we could do more.”

  “I made my choice, Doctor,” Damien replied. “I was prepared to die to save these people. This is an improvement from that plan.”

  #

  Magical telekinesis was one of the first things any Mage learned. Damien had used it over his life for everything from a personal gravity field to preserving air when dumped into deep space to inlaying silver directly into his skin.

  He had never used it to dress, and the process did not go smoothly. When Samara and Romanov entered the room, he was decent…but had failed to put on gloves, his Mage medallion or even his suit jacket.

  “You look like shit,” the Marine said bluntly, picking up the medallion on its leather collar and helping Damien put it on. “Like you shoved your hands into a forge.”

  “The comparison is…apt,” Damien admitted with a wince. “How are you holding up?”

  “I lost twelve people,” the Special Agent replied. “I’ve had better weeks. If not for the man I’m helping dress, however, I would have had a ringside seat to over fifteen thousand deaths in one of the biggest manmade fireballs of all time.

  “I can live with the end result,” he concluded, holding up the jacket for Damien to slide his arms into.

  Samara was waiting with the elbow-length gloves, an affectation that was now going to be a requirement, and carefully helped him slide his destroyed hands into the supple black leather.

  “Inshallah,” she finished Romanov’s comment, “I would have been one of those dead, Lord Montgomery. You saved my life along with thousands of others. Thank you.”

  “The job,” he replied, more than a little embarrassed. “A job it seems you inherited. His Majesty told me he passed the Warrant to investigate Kay on to you?”

  “He did,” she said softly. “There are a limited number of ships he could have teleported to from Texas Poker, my lord. I will find him.”

  “Pretty sure I’m definitely not a ‘my lord’ at this point,” Damien told her. “No Hand. No Warrant. I am neither a Hand nor a Voice now, Lady Samara.”

  Only years of practice with the mixed-ethnic skin tones common to Mars allowed him to pick out Samara’s flush.

  “I didn’t mean to steal anything—”

  “You’re better qualified to chase an interstellar fugitive than I,” he pointed out. “Just make sure you have a Combat Mage with you when you catch up to him. Are you inheriting Romanov?” he gestured to the ex-Marine.

  “I’ve been advised that I and my detail will be remaining assigned to you for the foreseeable future,” Romanov replied. “Whatever His Majesty has in mind for you, my lord, it appears a Secret Service detail will be required.”

  “Not sure what Alexander will want with one crippled Mage,” Damien said, shaking his head. “We’ve apparently finally managed to pass that wonderful afternoon on Andala for worst day ever, have we, Denis?”

  “If we can avoid being at ground zero of major kinetic impactors for the rest of both of our careers, I will be extremely happy, my lord,” Romanov replied.

  “So will I, Denis,” Damien admitted.

  “Now, I understand that His Majesty is waiting on me?”

  “And we have orders to make sure no one rushes you,” Samara told
him with a smile. “In answer to your question, I am being assigned a Marine Combat Mage strike team as escorts. Since, unlike Hands, I lack any magical abilities of my own, His Majesty feels I need powerful magical support and protection.”

  A Combat Mage strike team had three members. Between them, they could probably hold off a Hand, at least long enough for their charge to escape. His newest recruit would be well served.

  “Good,” he allowed. Glancing around the room, he sighed.

  “Tempted as I am to abuse your orders, I think it will be better all around if His Majesty and I go deal with the Council,” he told them. “Are you with me for this?”

  “I am,” Romanov confirmed. “Samara has…paperwork.”

  The investigator smiled. It was a cold expression.

  “I may still have research to do,” she said softly, “but I promise you, Damien Montgomery, the bastard who tried to destroy this station will be found.”

  #

  Chapter 40

  “You knew.”

  Damien wasn’t asking his King a question. The first words out of his mouth as he met Alexander in the office the Mage-King had commandeered were a statement of fact.

  From the way the older man immediately looked down at Damien’s gloved hands and sighed, he was completely correct.

  “Yes,” Alexander admitted. “Partly, I figured it was better for you to hear how bad it was from the actual doctor. Partly…I was too much of a coward to be the one to tell you.”

  Damien held his hands out, his nearly frozen fingers uppermost as he studied them. The black gloves at least covered the visible portion of the injury, though the tremors in his wrists and the immobility of his fingers told the story to those with eyes to see.

  “I was prepared to pay a higher price,” he finally said. “But it’s going to take time to truly sink in.”

  “Whatever treatment you need, whatever care is necessary, we will provide,” Alexander told him. “Though I know Dr. Nguyen suggested cybernetics…”

  “They would require reworking the remaining Runes of Power,” Damien replied instantly. “I know.”