“And what pattern does the mighty Hand see?”
“Someone in pain,” he told her. “Lashing out for attention, only to have the consequences smoothed away by the very people you want to see you. Until, eventually, you found something even your parents couldn’t bury with money and influence.
“So tell me, Miss Chambers”—he leaned forward to hold her dark eyes levelly—“given what I’m guessing, why is Ronald Armstrong still breathing? Even at fifteen, you could have broken his neck. Hell, even leaving him alive, you could have told the prosecutors what happened where no one else could see.”
“You can’t know about that,” she snapped. “No one knows about that. Except…”
Chambers sank her face into her hands.
“I told Karen in confidence,” she whispered. “I couldn’t… I wouldn’t…”
“Karen Jakab is the cousin of the commander of my cruiser,” Damien told her. “She begged a favor of him and he begged a favor of me—and I owe Kole Jakab more than I can count. So, I’m here. Looking at a girl who let an idiot ruin her life. Sound about right?”
She didn’t lift her face.
“What do you want?” she repeated, her voice very quiet. “My parents are…well, my parents”—a pair of senior judges in Tau Ceti’s Compact Judicial system, the separate justice system for Mages—“but Armstrong… his father was the Governor.”
Which had meant that Ronald Armstrong had dodged facing adult sexual assault charges—something he wouldn’t have dodged for an attempted rape charge. It also meant that he’d been dumb enough to try to charge Chambers for assault after she’d punched him out and fled the party.
Getting arrested and dropped into Tau Ceti’s Juvenile Detention system with its mandatory counselor visits was probably the best thing that could have happened to Chambers after that, short of her actually talking to her parents. Something that Damien could almost understand her being unwilling to do.
“Once, not that long ago, I sat where you are, in a room very much like this one,” Damien told her. “I faced having my magic stripped because no one would believe what I said. While where you sit isn’t quite that bad, you’ve lost a lot.”
She nodded.
“But you’ve been a model prisoner and your counselor thinks you have a great deal of potential, so I’m here,” Damien concluded. “You still want to be a Navy officer, Roslyn Chambers? Why?”
“Yeah,” she admitted. “Because…because…someone has to stop the bullies of the world. No matter the scale,” she finished fiercely, finally raising her head to look back at him.
“Good,” he told her. “Here’s the deal: you walk out of here in three days. The next intake exam for the Navy is in six months. You stay out of trouble and keep seeing your counselor for those six months and pass the ethics chunk of the exam, and I’ll put a letter on file that has your record ignored.
“You’ll enter the academy a year late, but having seen your test scores, I don’t think that will slow you down,” Damien finished. “Do you think you can do that, Roslyn? I can tell you the Protectorate needs every smart Mage it can get into uniform.”
“Even battered ones who’ve fucked up everything?” she asked.
“That’s why I’m offering you a chance to un-fuck everything,” he replied.
#
“Well?”
Damien nodded silently to Warden Conner, gesturing for the older man to show him to his office. With a sigh, the Warden obeyed. The instant obedience of most public officials to Damien’s office always bothered him. He shared dark hair and a slim build with the Warden, but Conner was easily thirty centimeters taller than him.
Entering the sparsely furnished office Conner ran the planet’s largest juvenile detention center from, the lanky prison warden repeated his question.
“Well? What do you think?”
“There’s a good kid in there,” Damien told Conner, looking around the man’s office. If you didn’t know you were in a prison, you’d have thought you were in a high school teacher’s office. The shelf of books on teaching and connecting with teenagers belonged in either, but the cheerful motivational posters had gone out of style everywhere but high schools.
“There’s a good kid in almost all of them,” the Warden replied. “There aren’t many irredeemable sixteen-year-olds, my lord. Some—but most of those end up in adult prisons. You think she’ll take you up on it?”
“I think so,” the Hand told him, squinting in thought. “I hope so, anyway. The Navy could use her.”
Even with Conner, he couldn’t admit that the Navy was quietly starting to prepare for war. No one expected anything soon, but Damien and the other Hands kept finding Legatan supplies and agents buried inside the conflicts they were sent to resolve.
Every smart young Mage was needed. Damien wasn’t certain what was coming—but he had his suspicions.
“I’ll leave a letter of instructions for the Navy recruiters with Miss Jakab,” Damien continued. “My understanding is that she’ll continue to act as Chambers’s counselor after her release.”
“That is generally our preference, though I’ll admit our counselors are always overloaded,” Conner admitted with a sigh. “We have just over twelve hundred kids in this place, and we cycle through over three thousand every year. I’m…honestly shocked you made the time to come down here.”
“You do good work here,” the Hand told him. “Though, admittedly, I’m on vacation and I owe Karen Jakab’s cousin a few dozen favors.” He smiled sadly. “Not least, I’m ‘on vacation’ because I got his ship shot up, and for some reason, the Navy wanted to fix it.”
Conner paused, clearly digesting that.
“Doesn’t Karen’s cousin command a battlecruiser?” he asked plaintively.
“Yes,” Damien confirmed. “The Navy lends it to me as a transport, and we got in some trouble last month.”
The prison warden shook his head at the concept of someone shooting at a cruiser of the Royal Martian Navy and checked his wrist-comp quickly.
“It’s almost time for the assembly you agreed to,” he noted. “I hope you don’t mind, but I pulled in all of the detainees, Mage and mundane.”
“If you hadn’t, Warden Conner, you’d be spending the next few minutes scrambling to fix that,” Damien replied. “If my time here leads even one of these kids to make better choices when they leave, it was a worthwhile side trip. Show me the way?”
Chapter 3
Being on vacation, as much as a Hand ever actually went on vacation, meant that Damien had the time to do things like address an entire prison full of teenagers on how they could turn their lives around. He doubted any of the teenagers actually believed he’d been a wanted fugitive at one point, but if even a handful of them listened and ended up in a Protectorate uniform, it had been worth it.
Since he was on vacation, though, he’d sent his staff on vacation. That meant that instead of Julia Amiri watching his back, he had a very earnest squad of Royal Martian Marines—who were intimidated enough by the Hand and his history not to argue when he’d told them to go grab a bite to eat with the prison guards.
Despite that, three of them were waiting for him when he left the auditorium stage, their faces grim.
“Sir, we just received a transmission from Mage-Admiral Segal,” said the squad leader, a Combat Mage-Lieutenant named Denis Romanov who was almost as earnest as Damien suspected himself of being. “He’s requested a secured channel to you as soon as you’re available.”
The Hand glanced back at the door behind him. Conner was still speaking to his detainees on the other side.
“Did he say how urgent?” he asked the Mage.
The young Mage-Lieutenant clearly thought that any request from an Admiral was high priority and shrugged in response.
“Corporal Levant,” Damien turned to one of the two junior Marines. “Could you please pass my regrets on to Warden Conner? It appears duty calls.”
The soldier nodded his agreement,
and the Hand turned back to the commander of his temporary bodyguard.
“Lead the way, Lieutenant Romanov.”
#
Since he mostly made his home on a Navy warship, Damien also used a Marine assault shuttle as his personal transport. It made life easier for his bodyguards, in the worst-case scenario he could fly it by himself, and it was often helpful to impress on people that the barely one hundred and fifty centimeter–tall quiet man in a tailored suit was dangerous.
It had other advantages, though. Since it was designed to function as a mobile command post as well as a delivery system and weapons platform, the shuttle had a small officers’ compartment tucked in behind the cockpit, with a full communications suite.
Activating the privacy shield, Damien brought up the encryption system and entered a sequence that would connect him to Mage-Admiral Segal’s flagship. A burly young man with pitch-black skin and hair appeared on his screen.
“Lieutenant Salil Ali speaking, how can I assist…Hand Montgomery!” Without even rising from his chair, the youth managed to stiffen to attention and salute crisply. “What do you need, my lord?”
“Admiral Segal requested to speak with me,” Damien replied. “Is he available?”
“He’s on the flag bridge, but he left orders for you to be connected to him immediately,” Ali replied. “Give me a minute, my lord.”
The screen faded into the stylized rocket-and-red-planet logo of the Royal Martian Navy for less than a minute, then a new image appeared on his screen.
Mage-Admiral Aaron Segal was a short man, not much taller than Damien himself, with broad shoulders and salt and pepper hair. He was turned out as perfectly as always, his navy blue uniform perfectly crisp and gold stars polished to a shine.
Something about his eyes, though, told Damien all was not well.
“My Lord Hand,” he greeted Damien. “How was your visit to the detention center?”
“Hopefully productive,” the young man replied. “It doesn’t take many minds changed to make a trip like that worth it. I received your message. What did you need to talk to me about?”
“Are you familiar with the Andala System, Lord Montgomery?” Segal asked.
Damien ran the name through his mind, remembering what he’d heard about it.
“Uninhabited system with alien ruins,” he dredged up. “We have some kind of research base there, right?”
“We do,” Segal confirmed. “Jointly funded by the top, oh, thirty universities in the Protectorate. I haven’t seen anything more exciting than a pottery party out of the expedition until the weekly courier dropped back into Tau Ceti two hours ago and transmitted an urgent priority message.”
“What kind of urgent priority does a camp full of scientists have?” Damien asked.
“Murder,” the Admiral said flatly. “Professor Yoshi Kurosawa apparently made an unauthorized breach into the previously sealed lower levels. He was a Mage and a Rune Scribe, and the lack of any evidence of magical capability in the Andalan facility’s upper levels bored him.
“His students found his body,” he concluded. “He was killed with magic, Damien—and he was supposed to be the only Mage in the system.”
“So, a mystery,” Damien murmured. Despite himself, he was intrigued—though he still didn’t see just why the Admiral had reached out to him. “I believe the Martian Investigation Service has a Tau Ceti station. We can spare a Marine escort with a few Combat Mages to keep the MIS team safe, can’t we?”
“We can, but I did contact you for a reason, my lord,” Segal replied. “Damien…Kurosawa found what he was looking for. His students found at least one fully functioning rune matrix in the room where they found his body.”
A fully functioning rune matrix.
A fully functioning alien rune matrix. That was the dream of any Rune Scribe like Kurosawa—and Damien finally understood why Segal had contacted him.
“I could send an MIS team and a dozen Rune Scribes,” Segal told him. “Or…I could ask a Rune Wright, who’ll sort out in an hour what would take the Scribes a year, to take a look.
“And since said Rune Wright is a Hand, with more investigative and police authority than any MIS team…”
Damien snorted and conceded the point.
There were, to his knowledge, exactly five Rune Wrights in the Protectorate. Two were the minor children of the Mage-King of Mars. Two others were the Mage-King of Mars and his sister. The last was Damien Montgomery himself.
Unlike other Mages, the Rune Wrights could see the flow of magic in runes, understand the use of a rune matrix in a glance instead of taking painstaking hours to read it. The additional understanding meant that Damien and the others could do many things ordinary Mages couldn’t—among other things, design the Runes of Power that they carved into their flesh, dramatically augmenting their own power.
That same Sight would enable him to read alien runes, understanding them regardless of how much or little they shared with humanity’s script.
“I’ll still need the MIS team,” he told Segal. “My Secret Service detachment is down to the bare minimum. I am on vacation,” he pointed out. “I’ll also need a ship. Duke of Magnificence is several weeks from being ready to deploy again.”
“I have a Navy armed courier I was going to put at the Investigation Service’s disposal,” Segal replied with a grin. “I can place it at your command instead.”
“I’ll take it,” Damien agreed. “I’ll need to speak to His Majesty first, though. This does seem sufficiently low-key, I think he’ll agree to let me cut my vacation short.”
#
Unlike the Andala System with its tiny research base or even many of the poorer systems of the Protectorate, Tau Ceti had a Runic Transceiver Array. Unlike even wealthier system, Tau Ceti had two—one for each of the two inhabited worlds, Tau Ceti e and Tau Ceti f.
The system had been one of the earliest settlements after the first Mage-King concluded the Compact that defined the relationship between man and Mage, and it had the wealth and industry to show it. Massive stations orbited ahead of each world, shielding them from the fields of meteors and comets that had regularly shattered the biospheres of both worlds before humanity had settled them.
Amidst the many signs of wealth and progress were the RTAs. Many systems didn’t have any. Damien’s own homeworld of Sherwood had been more able to afford an entire fleet of warships than a single Array. The Sherwood Array, partially funded by the Protectorate after the events of the last few months, would come online soon.
The nature of the Arrays prevented more than one being installed on a planet: they flung the voice of a Mage inside them across the galaxy to the target world and were only so accurate. Even an entire planet was a tiny target on that scale.
Tau Ceti was the only system with two of the massive black spherical facilities. Sol alone had more, with one each on Earth, Mars and Ganymede.
Damien’s rank and authority cleared him a fifteen-minute slot at the Tau Ceti f Array. His Marines led the way through the rune-encrusted obsidian hallways, his pair of Secret Service agents trailing behind. He’d given the Array short enough notice that they clearly hadn’t informed all of their staff, and he felt guilty as the various functionaries and administrative staff either pressed themselves against walls or cleared out of the way.
“Lieutenant Romanov,” he said softly, gesturing for the Combat Mage currently acting as his chief bodyguard to drop back and join him. “Remind me next time to warn them I apparently bring multitudes.”
That got a glimpse of a smile out of the perpetually serious soldier.
“I’m in contact with Array security,” Romanov murmured back. “We should be clear to the transmission chamber now.”
The number of staff the Marines had to gently move aside dropped off as they progressed, until the final layer of the immense onion-like structure of obsidian walls and silver runes was completely clear except for a single redheaded Mage in a uniform-like robe.
&nbs
p; “I am Transceiver Elva Santiago,” she told him. “We have cleared the secondary receiving chamber as requested, though we do have a recorder running in case any side transmissions come in. Per Guild rules, of course, we will remove your transmission from the recording, and you may verify this yourself afterwards.”
Damien smiled at the older woman.
“Miss Santiago, I have studied the history of the Protectorate with a careful eye, and never have the Transceiver Mages broken their oaths of confidentiality,” he reminded her. “I appreciate your efforts, however. A review of the recording will not be necessary this time.”
She inclined her head.
“The chamber is prepared for you,” she told him.
#
“So, both Segal and I agree that a Rune Wright would be ideal,” Damien concluded after summarizing the incident at Andala. “Which means me, my liege. While I hesitate to call the murder unimportant, I’m not sure a Hand is needed for that investigation—but if a Rune Wright is needed anyway, I see no reason not to handle that as well.”
“You are supposed to be on leave,” Desmond Michael Alexander the Third, Mage-King of Mars and Protector of Humanity, answered calmly. “That whole mess in Sherwood and Míngliàng was rather enough trouble. Are you sure you’re up to this?”
Damien sighed. A lot of people had died when a mining rights conflict between those two systems had nearly been fanned into open war. While he was reasonably comfortable now that there hadn’t been much else he could do, the dead had joined many others in his nightmares.
“It’s one murder in a base with barely a thousand people,” he pointed out. “It can only go so wrong—and we do need a Rune Wright. It’s almost a continuation of my vacation.”
He couldn’t see Alexander. Despite almost two centuries now of research, the only thing an RTA could transmit or receive was the voice of a speaking Mage. Any kind of data transmission had proven impossible—including, in one more experimental thought, via replacement of a volunteer’s voice box with an implant.
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