It seemed they were going to be disappointed.
Another flicker of nothing passed through the ship and Damien checked his computer to confirm what he already knew: they’d arrived in the Andala System.
#
Lightspeed delay in communication was a fact of life. Since they were in no hurry—no one had left the facility since the murder, according to the report Damien had received—and multi-second gaps in conversation weren’t conducive to mutual understanding, he waited until they were in orbit before reaching out to Dr. Kael.
The man who appeared on his wall when the channel finally connected couldn’t have been a more stereotypical professor if he tried. He was a portly, balding older man with his remaining hair gone shockingly white and a distracted, grumpy look on his face.
“You must be the MIS team,” Johannes Kael began immediately, cutting Damien off before the Hand could say a word. “You look too young, though. Whatever,” he said, cutting off his own question.
“Get down here at once,” he ordered. “You’ll coordinate with my security chief, Volk. You will not interrupt my people’s work or distract me until you have an explanation for Kurosawa’s death. We are very busy here and I will not tolerate interference!”
Damien was silent for a moment in pure shock. Even if he had “merely” been a Martian Investigation Service Inspector, Kael’s peremptory orders would have been unacceptable.
“Did they send the rune person with you?” he continued abruptly. “How nice of the Navy to send a ship—make sure they know they won’t be permitted on the planet. I shudder to think of the chaos those uniformed thugs would cause!”
“Dr. Kael,” Damien finally snapped. “Shut. Up.”
The academic administrator stumbled to a halt, tripping over his own tongue—then started to inhale, clearly about to launch onto a tirade.
In response, Damien leaned forward, making sure both the gold medallion at his throat—the one that marked him as a Mage, with symbols carved into it denoting his training as a Jump Mage, Combat Mage, and Rune Scribe—and the chain and amulet of his rank were fully visible in the camera.
“I am Hand Damien Montgomery,” he told Kael softly. “Your conditions are unacceptable, Doctor. This investigation is under the jurisdiction of Mars and will be carried out as I choose. Do you understand me?”
“We didn’t call for a Hand!” Kael barked.
“But a Hand is what you got. I speak for Mars, Doctor, and my assistance is not under discussion,” Damien told him calmly. “I am both your investigator and your rune expert. My shuttle will be departing TK-421 shortly, I expect to arrive within the hour, and I will be meeting with you as soon as I land.
“I will be accompanied by my shuttle’s four-man crew, three Secret Service Agents, three Martian Investigation Service Inspectors and a squad of Royal Martian Marines. Please make sure you have quarters ready for them,” Damien instructed. He paused, eyeing the now-silent academic.
“Will there be any problems, Dr. Kael?” he asked, his voice softer now. “Believe me when I say I have no intention of interrupting your people’s work more than I must, but Doctor Kurosawa’s discovery is of critical importance to the Protectorate—which makes his murder my concern as well.”
Doctor Johannes Kael visibly swallowed and slowly nodded.
“I had not considered it in that light,” he admitted. “I am concerned about both our research and my people’s morale, Lord Montgomery,” he continued, “but I will try not to impede your investigation.”
“Thank you, Dr. Kael,” Damien told him. “We will speak once I have landed.”
He cut the channel with a sigh. He’d give Kael the credit of his words, but somehow he doubted the man was going to manage to not be a problem.
#
The shuttle dropped away from TK-421 with all the grace of a brick dropped from a plane. The Royal Martian Marine Corps did not build their assault shuttles to be pretty or graceful. They built them to land in the face of hostile fire, take hits, and deliver their payload of Marines alive.
Damien’s detachment was smaller than the platoon the shuttle was designed to deliver, which thankfully meant there were safety harnesses for everyone. Among other things, the RMMC didn’t bother with gravity runes in their shuttles, so multi-gravity combat maneuvers were painful affairs.
In the absence of incoming fire, the MIS Inspectors had clearly thought the harnesses wouldn’t be required. Luckily for them, Mage-Lieutenant Romanov had insisted—and the Navy pilot of the assault shuttle promptly dropped them toward the planet at four gees.
“Are we actually in this much of a hurry, my lord?” Inspector Mara Dragic, the senior member of the MIS team Damien had “borrowed” on his way out of Tau Ceti, asked. The dark-haired, hook-nosed police officer looked vaguely ill under the force of the acceleration.
“No,” Damien allowed. “But the people responsible for our safety, Inspector Dragic, take it very seriously. They may take unnecessary precautions—but the day those precautions turn out to be necessary, you will be very glad they were taken.”
She looked confused for a moment.
“When would this become necessary?” she finally asked.
“It was on Ardennes,” Damien said shortly. “A squad of Marines and a Navy flight crew, much like these men and women, died to get me to the ground alive then. So, you are right, Inspector, that I do not expect this to be necessary today. But I didn’t expect it to be necessary then, either.”
The whole mess on Ardennes was public knowledge, though given the size of the Protectorate, Damien doubted few of the Mage-King’s citizens knew more than the headline blurb of “A Hand falls, another rises, Governor removed for treason.”
He was okay with that.
“Landing in ten minutes,” the shuttle pilot reported. “We have a storm incoming, and despite my best efforts, we aren’t going to miss it. It’s going to get bumpy.”
Dragic looked even more horrified for a moment.
“This isn’t bumpy?”
#
The planet Andala IV wasn’t habitable by humanity but that didn’t mean it lacked life. A strange forest of blue-green trees with spindly branches and strange cylindrical leaves shifted and trembled in the hammering rain and vicious wind as the assault shuttle finally touched down.
Inspector Dragic had managed to make it all the way to the surface intact, but as soon as she attempted to rise, she crumpled to her knees and vomited. The ever-handy Romanov had a bag in her hand the moment before she lost it, and the mess was at least contained.
The new Mage-Lieutenant, a stocky, mannish, blonde woman Damien had been introduced to as Karina White, moved up to the airlock with a quartet of Marines. All five wore small metal breathers over their mouths, and another fire team of Marines was passing out the devices to everyone else.
“We’ll sweep the pad for threats,” she said calmly. “Please remain aboard until we report it clear.”
If White was surprised by her fire team suddenly acquiring a suited Secret Service agent after her announcement, she didn’t show it. She led all five of her companions out into the airlock and cycled it behind her.
“Are you all right, Inspector?” Damien asked Dragic.
“Yes, my lord,” she confirmed, taking a proffered cloth from one of the Marines to clean her face before putting on the breather.
“Pad is clear,” White reported over a radio channel. “Dr. Kael is waiting inside the facility.”
“Let’s go,” Damien instructed, only to get a raised hand from Dragic.
“Shouldn’t you be wearing a breather, my lord?”
He smiled. Once, long before, he’d been a mere apprentice to an older and wiser Hand who had told him it wouldn’t do for a Hand to appear like “a soaked rat.” Appearances were important, and not needing the breather or being bothered by the storm they’d landed in were components of projecting power in a way Dr. Kael would understand.
“I am a Hand,” he told
the Inspector. “I’ll be fine. Let’s go.”
#
From the shocked double take Doctor Johannes Kael made when Damien walked in from the rain and poisonous atmosphere outside his climate-controlled camp site without a breather and bone dry, the point was probably made.
“Welcome to the Andala Expedition Research Facility, my lord.” The balding scientist offered his hand to Damien, who calmly shook it.
“Thank you, Doctor.”
Damien glanced around the reception area for the facility, such as it was. Kael had only two companions with him, who he gestured to immediately.
“Allow me to introduce Miss Jessica Volk, our head of security and facilities,” he waved toward a tall woman with soft features and a clean-shaven head. She bowed slightly at Kael’s introduction. “She is seeing to quarters for your companions, but it’s taking some time.”
“We were using the space as storage, to be honest,” Volk told Damien in an unusually deep voice. “I don’t have a lot of manpower, so it will take us most of the day to get the spare quarters freed up.”
“Romanov?” Damien asked. He didn’t need to specify what he wanted.
“Kitcher, Chan,” the ever-serious Lieutenant barked crisply. “Take your fire teams and help Miss Volk out. If the extra manpower would be of use?”
It sounded like a question, but Damien didn’t think anyone in the room was fooled. In addition to helping clear out and set up the quarters, the two Marine teams would make sure they were safe.
“Of course,” Volk agreed cheerfully. “If you’ll excuse us, Dr. Kael?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Kael said shortly, and gestured the third person with him forward. “This is Jarek Zitnik. He was Professor Kurosawa’s senior student and the one who found his body.”
“Ah, good,” Damien said, offering his hand to the youth. Dark-haired with tanned skin, tall and muscular, Zitnik looked more physically able than some of the Marines, hardly what he would have expected of a xenoarchaeology student.
“Professor Kurosawa was a mentor and a friend,” Zitnik told him in noticeably accented English. “If anything I can do will help catch his killer, I am more than willing.”
“Let’s take this conversation somewhere more private,” Damien suggested. “Inspector Dragic’s team will start interviewing the rest of the staff, starting with Kurosawa’s students.”
“I can arrange some…” Kael trailed off at the Hand’s gesture.
“No,” he ordered. “They will arrange things, with the support of the Marines. Surprise, I’m told, is helpful in these affairs.”
Kael visibly swallowed again.
“I wish I could say it was just an accident,” he whispered. “Just a damn fool old man who fell off a balcony.”
“You saw the body, Doctor,” Zitnik told him.
“I did,” the Andala Expedition’s senior scientist confirmed, drawing himself back up with a firm nod. “The compound is not particularly large, Lord Montgomery. My office is nearby. Shall we?”
#
Mage-Lieutenant Denis Romanov watched the Hand disappear deeper into the prefabricated modules making up the research camp, trailed by his three Secret Service agents for now, then turned to the two Martian Investigation Service Inspectors and his remaining Marines.
“Carmichael, your team is with White,” he ordered, gesturing the other Mage to him. “Mage-Lieutenant, I want you to sweep the exterior of the research camp and the alien base. Set up the scanners we brought with us—I don’t trust a bunch of scientists to have set up systems able to see anyone sneaking up on us.”
“Of course,” she said crisply. “Should I pre-cache supplies and weapons as well?”
“Munitions, breather filters, SAMs,” he confirmed after a moment’s thought. “We should be able to deploy in armor and with weapons, but extra ammunition and air supplies won’t go amiss.”
It was paranoid, but it was his job to be paranoid.
“Make sure the Service agents know the location of the caches as well as our people,” he ordered. “And include ammo for their systems, too.”
The Martian Secret Service was charged with defending the Mage-King, his family, his Hands, and the members of the Council of the Protectorate. Their preferred weapons systems were lighter and more transportable than his Marines’ gear—and traded having higher maintenance requirements and lower ammunition capacity for comparable performance.
The only real flaw Denis saw in the Secret Service’s heavier gear was that it couldn’t trade ammunition with the RMMC rifles. Thankfully, the Service, the Marines, and the MIS all used the same sidearm, so ammunition for that wasn’t a concern.
“Isn’t that a little paranoid?” one of the two MIS agents asked as White led Carmichael’s fire team back into the airlock. “This is a murder investigation. Why would we end up outside, living on emergency caches?”
“I don’t know,” Denis told the cop. “But my job until Special Agent Amiri gets back is to make sure that Damien Montgomery survives. Since almost nobody is stupid enough to go straight at a Hand, that means we prepare for what we don’t expect to happen.”
He glanced around the prefabricated reception area and concealed a shiver. They had a single armed courier in orbit and the research camp had no defenses. No communication, no support, no backup. He wondered if the Hand had even registered how vulnerable this place was if someone decided to come after him.
“But our job today is to find a murderer,” he told the Inspector with a smile. “My people will stick to yours like glue, but this part is your show. How do you want this to work?”
Chapter 6
The spartan nature of the plain entrance and sterile white hallways that made up the prefabricated habitats of the Andala Expedition’s “campsite” didn’t prepare Damien for the crowded reality of Dr. Kael’s office.
It seemed that the Professor had understood exactly how long-term his position as head of the Expedition was going to be, and had brought all of the comforts of home. A massive wooden desk with an old-fashioned leather-and-chrome swivel chair held pride of place in the office—and represented the only clear surface in the room!
Wooden bookshelves had been lined up along every wall, all of them full to bursting with books, printed reports, and miscellaneous artifacts and bric-à-brac collected across a lifetime. There were three comfortable-looking chairs in the room, but all three had books and data disks piled on them.
A side table had been stuffed in beside the desk to add extra workspace and had apparently been sacrificed to the gods of clutter that ruled this place. Unlike the desk, it was covered in the same papers as the rest of the room, only with dirty plates and cups added to the mess.
“You can move the papers on the chairs,” Kael instructed. “Just make sure they stay together—there is a system, though I know it isn’t obvious.”
Damien twitched his fingers and the piles on all three chairs lifted up, neatly organized themselves, and dropped onto the corner of Kael’s desk. Interesting, despite the mess of the rest of the office, the professor clearly twitched at there being something on his desk.
The blatant display of power, much as Damien hated making it, seemed to settle the point though. The theatrics required for his job grated on him sometimes, but he had no intention of letting the Expedition’s leader mistake their relative positions.
Taking one of the comfortable chairs himself, he waited for Dragic and Zitnik to sit, then gestured for the MIS woman to begin.
“I’ll have questions for you both with regards to Kurosawa’s time here,” she noted, “but for the moment, let’s start with the most obvious. I understand that Mister Zitnik here found the body. Can you tell me exactly what happened?”
The athletic xenoarchaeology student nodded, taking a moment to compose himself.
“About half of the people researching here are postgrad students,” he began. “We’re all assigned to a specific professor, usually on a one-to-one basis. Since Runic Studi
es is a relatively small specialization, especially for non-Mages, Kurosawa agreed to mentor the three of us in that specialty who ended up here.”
“How did three Runic Studies–specialized students end up here?” Damien asked.
Zitnik coughed and looked uncomfortable.
“Well…” He sighed. “There were no runes here to study, so it was the posting that was left over for the non-Mage students.”
Damien winced but nodded. Non-Mage students in a field like Runic Studies would be at a disadvantage to begin with, since a non-Mage couldn’t be a Rune Scribe and Runic Studies was mostly a precursor to that title. Since non-Mages were rare among those who could teach it, mundane students would be the last choice for any work placement.
It made sense, though it also resulted in an immense barrier to creating the non-Mage rune specialists whose unique points of view had been key to many advances in magic over the last quarter-millennium.
“Who are the other students of Doctor Kurosawa?” Dragic asked.
“Myself, Samara Hollins, and Talin Davidyan,” Zitnik told them. “We’re each from different universities—different worlds, even. I’m from Tau Ceti, Hollins is from Mars, and Davidyan is from a Fringe World I’d never heard of.”
“All right,” Dragic said after a moment. She was taking notes on her wrist computer via a holographic keyboard only she could see. “So, you were looking for Professor Kurosawa? Why?”
“With the regular courier in system, I’d just received feedback from my university on my draft thesis,” Zitnik told them. “It was positive, but they had some key points I wanted to run by the professor. He wasn’t in his office, but I knew he’d been wandering the facility to try and get a feel for how the Strangers thought.
“He’s also been really frustrated over the decision not to open up the lower levels,” the student continued, glancing over at Kael.
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