Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  Passing the cold-packs to Corei, Mandela hooked up the scanners on the hospital bed, positioning one directly above Montgomery’s head and another above his chest. Looking at a series of numbers that meant nothing to Denis, she shook her head slowly.

  “I’m going to give him a hibernation agent,” she told them. “It’ll put him in an induced coma and slow his metabolism; it should get his body temperature down and protect his brain.”

  She pulled out a hypodermic and filled it with a disturbingly purple fluid.

  “Keep those cold-packs on him,” she ordered. “Everything we’re doing is just buying time, gentlemen. I have no idea how to handle this beyond keeping him alive until his body recovers.”

  “We need to get him to Tau Ceti,” Denis said grimly. “But he sent the courier away.”

  “Then we better hope they come back,” Mandela replied. “Because this is bad, and I doubt I can do more than buy him time. This is out of my league.”

  #

  “Chan, where are you?” Denis asked as he leaned against the door of the clinic. “I need an update on our mysterious friend.”

  “I’m in the Expedition’s Space Traffic Control Center,” the Corporal replied. “I’ve got people guarding the door; we’re in complete control of comms and sensors, boss.”

  “Good.” Denis was reasonably sure the only threat in the Expedition itself was dead, but the lanky Marine was utterly unwilling to take risks at this point. “And our trigger-happy friend?”

  “A light-second away and accelerating fast,” the noncom replied. “I expect to see them jump in another hour or so.”

  “Good,” Denis repeated. In the attacker’s place, he’d probably be running with his tail between his legs too. They had no evidence Montgomery couldn’t just swat aside every single attack they threw his way. Denis wasn’t sure exactly how the Hand had been able to do that, but he suspected it had something to do with the runes that had literally burned their way through the other Mage’s clothing.

  “Keep an eye on them,” he ordered. “I’m coming to join you.”

  If Chan already had the STC secured, that gave them at least one place they could plan in private.

  “Afolayan,” he pinged his other surviving Corporal. “Once your team is out of the suits, I need you to proceed to the infirmary. Place yourself under Agent Corei’s command; he is in charge of Hand Montgomery’s security.

  “No one except Dr. Mandela and her staff goes in that room unless they’re unconscious or dying; understand me, Corporal?”

  “Yes. On our way,” the Corporal replied in his thick accent—his colony had actively preserved the tribal languages of western Africa, and English was Kweku Afolayan’s seventh language, if Denis understood the man’s history correctly.

  The Mage-Lieutenant was also sure that the Corporal often exaggerated his accent to make people underestimate him—a dangerous mistake, as Afolayan was probably the smartest man in his squad.

  “Thank you, Corporal,” he said quietly, then flipped to another channel. “Inspector Dragic.”

  “How are we doing, Mage-Lieutenant?” she asked. “Is Montgomery…”

  “The Hand is critical but still with us,” Denis told her honestly. “We need to talk next steps, Inspector. As I understand the Hand’s chain of command, you’re in charge now. Meet me at the Space Traffic Control Center? We have it secured.”

  “I’ll be there in five,” she promised.

  #

  It was a somber group that gathered amidst the screens and blinking lights of the prefabricated space traffic control room. Dragic had brought both of her subordinates with her, and Denis had Chan, whose Marines stood guard outside the door.

  “I have no idea what the next step is,” the senior Martian Investigation Service investigator admitted once the door closed, separating them from the rest of the compound. “I’m a cop, Mage-Lieutenant. I was brought here to investigate a murder, not… I don’t know what this is. A war?”

  “A conspiracy,” Denis said bluntly. “An organization able to plant assassins both in the Expedition and in my Marine squad. An organization with access to a ship of a type I’ve never seen before, with tech and weapons that are restricted to the Martian Navy and Martian Marines.”

  He shook his head.

  “My understanding is that the Navy doesn’t even like Hands having access to specialized orbital impactors,” he told the cop. “Duke of Magnificence surrendered hers when she was tapped to act as Hand Montgomery’s personal transport. But someone fired four modern orbit-to-surface kinetic weapons at this base and then followed up with troops who may as well have been Marines.”

  “This is…way over all of our heads,” Dragic replied. “What the hell do we do?”

  Denis Romanov sighed and stepped over to look at the screen showing the mystery ship.

  “How much data did these sensors actually get on that ship?” he asked Chan.

  “Less than a proper planetary net would have grabbed,” the dark-skinned man with the slanted eyes said quietly. Unlike many in the Martian Navy, he was actually from China instead of being the ambiguous mixed brown with epicanthic folds of a Martian native. “We’ve got enough we can identify her if we see her again, but for any real analysis, we’ll want TK-421’s sensors.”

  “Did Pokorni make it out?” Denis asked.

  “She did. Our friends lobbed half a dozen missiles at the courier, and she ran like a flushed rabbit,” Chan told him bitterly.

  “Armed or not, TK-421 wasn’t designed to get into fights with warships,” Denis said. “She’ll be back, and with that sensor data. Once she’s here, we’ll load Montgomery onto her and head straight for Tau Ceti. The big Navy Hospital there has the people and facilities to treat him; we certainly don’t.”

  “Will he live?” Dragic asked.

  “The doctor says he needs better care than she can give,” he admitted. “The sooner TK-421 is back, the happier I’ll be. Once we’re in Tau Ceti, we can send a squadron to make sure this place is safe. What we need—what Montgomery is going to need when he wakes up—is more data.”

  He was looking at the MIS team, and Dragic met his gaze with calm confidence. She might not know how to handle someone trying to blow her apart from orbit, but she could do data gathering.

  “There are a pile of dead guys in the tunnels,” he reminded them. “A bunch of crashed shuttles with more dead guys and gear. We need to go through them all, see if we can find serial numbers, identification plates, wallets—anything we can use to identify these assholes or who supplied them.

  “It’s ugly work,” he concluded, “searching the dead. But we need to know what is going on here.”

  “That, my dear Lieutenant,” the MIS Inspector said brightly, “we can do. We’ll learn what we can.”

  Chapter 14

  “What did you do?” Inspector Mara Dragic demanded as the survey buggy they’d borrowed from the Expedition rounded the exterior of the dome shielding the base camp and she saw, for the first time, the hell zone their defense had turned the ground between the alien habitat domes into.

  “Six two-hundred-milligram antimatter fuel tanks,” Denis told her simply. He pointed out the locations. “We set them under the most likely landing spots and cracked the casings with the warheads from the missiles we ripped the tanks out of. Nailed two of their shuttles and crippled a third.”

  “That’s what we’ll start with, then,” she decided aloud. “Take us to the intact shuttle.”

  “On our way already,” he confirmed. They were short enough on troops and people they trusted that he was the only Marine with the MIS trio, and he was driving the buggy himself. He’d left the rest of his battered squad guarding the traffic control center and Montgomery.

  Pulling up to the shuttle, he studied the lines and sighed. The spacecraft had been picked up by an antimatter blast, flipped at least once in the air, and slammed back down onto molten ground. Its hull was warped, its landing struts and engines were be
nt and broken, and several of its struts were embedded in melted and resolidified sand—and it was still recognizably an RMMC assault shuttle, coated in radar-absorbing paint.

  “The entrance will be over here,” he told Dragic. “This is…definitely one of ours.”

  Nodding, the three Martian Investigation Service Inspectors followed him around the forty-meter-long craft. As they reached the door, his communicator chirped.

  “What is it, Chan?” he asked.

  “Our friend finally jumped,” the noncom manning the sensors informed him. “We have clear skies, Mage-Lieutenant. What do you want me to do with them?”

  Their one assault shuttle and its Navy crew weren’t going to do any good even if they put it into space.

  “Wait,” he ordered. “Let me know the moment TK-421 returns to the system. We’ll need to haul ass spaceward with Montgomery as soon as Pokorni’s back, but there’s no point even moving him until she is.”

  “Understood, sir,” Chan replied. “I’ll keep an eye out for our lost Navy puppy.”

  Shaking his head, Denis turned his attention back to the wrecked shuttle in front of him. They’d reached the end of the ship, where the landing ramp had been blown clear by the emergency explosive bolts.

  It clearly hadn’t saved anyone. A dozen exosuited figures were scattered through the back half of the shuttle, eternally frozen in positions as joints had overloaded and the occupants had died.

  “Roshan, check those suits,” Dragic ordered. “Tane, check the shuttle systems. Lieutenant, anything in particular we should check for?”

  “Serial numbers on the gear,” he told her. “Mostly scanned by radio tag these days, but we also inscribe them into the upper portion of each piece of the armor. The shuttle should have an ID number of its own—at the base of the ramp and in the cockpit, same number.”

  “What about the computers?”

  “We’ll probably just want to physically pull them,” he admitted. “The Hand might be able to override their security, or the Navy computers back in Tau Ceti might be able to crack it, but I’d bet both my fathers we won’t be able to open whatever encryption they have.”

  “We have some tools that might surprise you,” Dragic told him.

  “Umm…Mage-Lieutenant,” Roshan interrupted, the MIS investigator having started to dismantle the armor. “I need you to take a look at this.”

  The troop compartment of the shuttle wasn’t particularly large, and Denis joined the investigator in moments, looking down into the armor suit Roshan had started dismantling. The investigator clearly had at least some passing familiarity with the exosuit, as he’d opened up the back first, the chunk of slightly thicker armor that should have contained the central CPU and its links to the helmet and armor.

  Instead, it contained ashes and burnt-out circuits. Ignoring the corpse—and very glad his breather blocked his sense of smell—Denis reached in and grabbed several specific locations. Exerting a practiced force, he yanked the entire back plate of the armor off, exposing the mess of circuits and wires that was the core computing component of an exosuit.

  All of it was gone, burned out by a dozen tiny explosives and electrical surges.

  “That wasn’t your bomb, was it?” Roshan asked.

  “No. That’s a deadman-activated computer suicide switch,” Denis said grimly.

  “Is…” Roshan considered how to ask his question. “Is all Marine armor set up to burnt itself out like this?”

  “No. Check his wrist, see if he has a PC,” the Marine ordered. The investigator obeyed promptly, opening up both vambraces and exposing a shade of mixed-brown skin that could have originated on any of the Protectorate’s ninety-plus worlds.

  No computer. No dog-tags either, Denis confirmed quickly.

  “The computer is heavily protected,” he noted. “The primary memory is supposed to survive the death of the wearer, to allow their data to be retrieved for later analysis.” He tapped the largest of the scorch marks. “It was directly under one of the kill charges. This was specifically designed as part of the armor.”

  “So…if not all Marine exosuits do this…”

  “It’s an option that can be installed,” the Mage-Lieutenant admitted with a sigh. “Force Recon Commandos use it, and I suspect that something similar ends up in black ops units nobody would tell me about.

  “But these guys…they weren’t Force Recon,” he concluded. “Two platoons of Force Recon against my squad? We’d all be dead. Some kind of black, unlisted unit…obviously, I guess.”

  “But it’s weird,” Dragic said calmly.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s check the shuttle systems.”

  #

  Denis was unsurprised to find similar charges had been set throughout the shuttle. The three-woman crew had died when the shuttle had flipped—they’d all been out of their restraints, coordinating with the landing force, presumably. The crew members and the officer in the communications / tactical center had all been clad in insignia-less black fatigues.

  No personal computers. No dog tags. Every computer on the ship destroyed by explosives, whether triggered on the death of the three crewwomen or by remote control, the investigators couldn’t say. The panel on the ship that should have contained the manufacturer’s identification number had clearly had an extended encounter with an arc welder and a file.

  The armor pieces had been similarly rendered anonymous. Dragic took DNA samples from everyone, but Denis had little hope. The attack force had been completely sanitized prior to landing. He doubted their DNA would show up in any databases that he or Dragic could access.

  “We’re also taking material samples,” she told him, rejoining him at the exit from the ship as he looked out over the desolate waste he’d created. “There are a few points in the ship deep enough to be protected from the antimatter blasts.”

  “Will it help?” he asked.

  “We’ll probably be able to identify where the ships and armor were made,” she said.

  “Sol or Tau Ceti,” Denis told her bitterly. “Only two places the RMMC manufactures these shuttles and this armor. It’s all our gear, Inspector. The pilots flew like Marines. The soldiers fought like Marines.”

  “They weren’t Marines, Mage-Lieutenant,” Dragic reminded him. “They might have fought like them, but they weren’t Marines. Protectorate Marines don’t hide who they are.”

  “That we know of,” he replied. “But we wouldn’t know, would we? These people were just as well trained as mine. Just as well equipped. We beat them off by luck and massive application of explosives, and I have no idea who they were. They could well have been Marines. Hell—White was a Marine.”

  “Romanov, they attacked a Hand. They dropped kinetic weapons on civilians. I think it's pretty safe to say they weren’t Marines,” the MIS Inspector told him harshly. “You just saved a thousand lives. We’ll find who attacked this planet. We’ll find who White was working for.”

  She smiled grimly. “That’s our part of the job, Lieutenant. Your part was to make sure everybody lived this far, and you did that with style.”

  #

  Andala was setting over the shattered plain, the star just starting to dip behind the “western” dome, when TK-421 finally returned.

  Denis had left the wrecked shuttle to the forensics experts, pacing the half-melted concrete and sand his desperate improvisation had created. The devastation was oddly contained, the ancient alien domes standing up to being functionally nuked at point-blank range with surprising aplomb. Each bomb had been relatively small, after all, and the concrete mountains had channeled the force back into the plain in the midst of them.

  For all that, the damage seemed entirely out of scale with the actual deaths inflicted. All told, the antimatter bombs had killed fewer than eighty people but turned a kilometer-wide, roughly square plain of concrete to glass and dust.

  To the Marine, that sounded like…well, whatever the opposite of overkill was. If he’d done this much dam
age and killed all of his opponents, he might have accepted the possibility of overkill. Since his enemies had still had sixty exosuited soldiers to send into the tunnels after him, he clearly hadn’t tried hard enough.

  His PC chirping interrupted his thoughts, and he linked his helmet communicator back into the network.

  “Romanov here.”

  “It’s Chan,” his subordinate told him. “We just picked up a jump flare. TK-421 is back. She’s about five light-seconds out.”

  “Link me in anyway,” Denis ordered.

  “You’re live.”

  “Mage-Lieutenant-Commander Pokorni, this is Lieutenant Romanov,” he announced. “We need you to get into orbit ASAP and prepare for a medical evacuation. Hand Montgomery has been injured and we need to relay him back to Tau Ceti as soon as possible.”

  Seconds ticked by as his message crossed space at the occasionally seemingly slow speed of light and Pokorni’s response returned at the same speed.

  “What happened, Lieutenant?” her voice snapped on the channel, emphasizing his junior rank. “Where is Montgomery?”

  “Hand Montgomery is in the Andala Expedition’s infirmary in medically induced hibernation,” he explained patiently. “He is suffering from a severe case of thaumic burnout, and nobody here or on your ship is qualified to treat him. We need to evacuate him immediately.”

  More waiting.

  “We’re talking about a Hand,” Pokorni finally said. “What did he do?”

  “He stopped an orbital bombardment. Three times.” Denis shook his head. “An orbital bombardment from the ship you allowed to enter orbit without being challenged.”

  “You’re on dangerous ground, Lieutenant,” the courier Captain responded. “I’ll need my staff to review the Hand’s condition, but we can pick him up as soon as we reach orbit.”

  “Hurry, Pokorni,” the Marine replied with a sigh. “Believe me, Lieutenant Commander, there is nothing you can threaten me with that’s worse than the day I’ve had.”