He owed Damien Montgomery his life and the lives of the men and women under his command. If saving the Hand’s life in turn required him to board and seize a Navy ship by force, well, he’d already nuked an irreplaceable ruin today.
Denis Romanov smirked under his breather. He really was having a bad day. Pokorni was an annoying coward, but she wasn’t stupid. They’d get Montgomery to Tau Ceti safely.
Chapter 15
Damien woke up with a splitting headache to a darkened room. Unsure of where he was, he reached for his magic to light up the space.
It refused to answer. He could feel its presence, but the usual easily summoned warmth stayed stubbornly buried inside him, weakly flickering in complaint at his demands.
Never in the over two decades since his Gift had been discovered and he’d been trained in its use had it ever simply…refused like that, and he panicked.
He lurched from the bed, displacing sensors and tubes he hadn’t realized were dug into his flesh. He swore in pain as an IV ripped itself out of his wrist and a shunt half-tore from his chest.
Despite everything in his way, Damien made it off the bed before his limbs simply refused to cooperate anymore and he crashed to the floor—and at that point, the catheter came out to an even louder round of cursing.
The sensors around him added a series of braying alarms to the cacophony, and then the door to the room slid open and the lights came up.
Finally able to see, Damien recognized his surroundings as a Navy hospital’s private room, an intensive care space for officers and dignitaries.
A pair of male orderlies stood in the door, neither apparently quite sure what to do, before a doctor cut between them.
“You weren’t supposed to wake up for several more hours,” the tall black man in the white coat and military insignia. “Are you all right, my lord?”
“I can’t access my Gift and I just ripped out a catheter,” Damien replied between sharp inhalations. “I’ve had better days.”
“Reynolds, Hart, get him back on the bed and hooked up,” the doctor snapped. “I am Surgeon Mage-Commander Aziz Mohammed. You may be awake, my lord, but you are still extraordinarily weak. If you had arrived at my hospital even a dozen hours later, I’m not sure even the frankly brilliant idea to put you in forced hibernation would have been enough to save you.”
“Last I remember,” Damien said slowly, wincing as the nurses tried to gently reinsert the tubes he’d yanked out, “I was on Andala IV.” Hoping he was able to stop even one more set of military impactors. He was more than a little surprised he was alive.
“Where I have no idea what you did,” Mohammed said cheerfully, “but you managed to give yourself the single worst case of thaumic burnout I have seen in forty-six years as one of the Navy’s medical Mages.”
The doctor wore the same gold medallion at the base of the throat as every other Mage in the Protectorate, but his bore the caduceus of the medical profession. To Damien’s knowledge, less than five hundred Mages in the entire Protectorate had the right to wear that symbol on their medallion.
“I was in good hands,” he acknowledged aloud as the orderlies finished their work. He hadn’t struggled against them—he physically couldn’t. “How bad was it, Doctor?”
“Out,” Dr. Mohammed ordered his staff. Both obeyed with a cheerful alacrity, saluting both the doctor and the Hand as they left. Once the door slid shut behind them, the white-coated Navy Mage pulled a chair up next to Damien’s bed and sat.
“I’ve only seen runes like yours once before,” he said quietly. “On another Hand, who had one of them, not five. I don’t even need to be told never to tell anyone else what I’ve seen, Lord Montgomery. I can guess what they do.”
The doctor shook his head.
“Two days ago, I would have said that the human body could only handle a certain level of thaumic burnout before a fatal aneurysm,” he said clinically.
Damien winced at the mental image regardless. That had almost been him.
“Your runes, in addition to clearly allowing you to channel more power than a regular Mage, also appear to enable you to absorb more burnout,” Mohammed concluded. “Not only can you conjure more power, but you can also take more backlash. I’d call it unfair, but I saw the amount of scar tissue you’ve picked up regardless.”
“How long was I out?” Damien asked slowly.
“Four days,” the doctor replied. “And you’re not leaving this room for at least two more. You are magically and physically exhausted. Your body has no reserves left in either sense.”
“My magic will come back, though, right?”
“Relatively quickly at this point, yes.” The doctor shook his head. “I had to go into your head with magic to lower temperature and relieve pressure, my lord. It’s a delicate, slow, dangerous process. If you had gone anywhere else, you would have died. Only Sol would be certain to have doctors trained in the same process, and you have would have died before you reached Sol.”
“I need to be briefed on what happened in Andala, Doctor Mohammed,” Damien told him. He paused. “For that matter, where are Mage-Lieutenant Romanov and Agent Corei?”
“Agent Corei and Mage-Lieutenant Romanov are running security on this ward,” the doctor replied. “Using, as I understand, only Marines who were with you in Sherwood. Brigadier General Ihejirika, whose Ninth Marine Brigade normally has responsibility for our security, has thrown up a second cordon around us in addition to the normal security of the Tau Ceti Navy Hospital.” The tall black man shook his head. “I wouldn’t be surprised to discover Admiral Segal has moved his battleship over here to watch over the station. Everyone is being very paranoid about you.”
“Reassuring,” the Hand said slowly. “I’ll cooperate with being locked up in here, Doctor, if you can arrange a briefing for me.”
Mohammed chuckled.
“Son, I’m under direct orders to inform the Admiral the moment you’re awake. I believe he intends to take care of that personally.”
#
Damien had managed to get about three hours’ sleep and was feeling slightly more human by the time Mage-Admiral Segal arrived. The stocky, perfectly turned-out Navy officer brought Mage-Lieutenant Romanov with him and was escorted in by Doctor Mohammed.
“We need to discuss with Lord Montgomery in private, Doctor,” Segal told him.
“I understand,” the doctor accepted. “You have thirty minutes, and I’m watching his vitals from the other room. If I don’t think you’re up for more, Hand Montgomery, I’m kicking everyone out and you will all listen to me, understand, sirs?”
“Yes, Doctor,” Damien allowed, gesturing Segal and Romanov to the seats in the room. With one last admonishing glare, Mohammed let himself out of the recovery room and shut the door behind him.
“Apparently, I’m locked in here and hooked up to these machines for at least twelve more hours,” he told Segal and Romanov. “After that, my understanding is that I’m to remain under observation for at least one more day.”
“That seems reasonable,” Segal said calmly. “The Mage-Captain here said that it was a near-run thing, and that everyone else would have died without you.”
The Hand blinked and realized he’d missed the change in Romanov’s insignia. Where the young Mage had previously had a single silver bar on his epaulets, he now boasted two: the insignia of a Royal Martian Marine Corps Captain.
“Congratulations,” Damien told the Marine. Despite his occasionally paternal feelings toward the soldiers set to protect him, Romanov was only a year younger than he was. He’d probably been due for a company anyway, but his actions on Andala IV must have sealed the deal.
“He also tried to downplay his own accomplishments,” the Mage-Admiral continued, “in the finest tradition of His Majesty’s Marines. His subordinates’ reports and the files Inspector Dragic sent along with him made his actions very clear, however, and Brigadier Ihejirika pinned his Captain’s bars on him last night.”
He
coughed somewhat delicately. “To be fair, that rapid a promotion requires an extra level of authorization. The Brigadier and I can make it stick, but if you would be prepared to sign off…”
“Admiral, Captain,” Damien said, smiling and shaking his head, “I watched Mage-Captain Romanov hold the line against six times his numbers with ingenuity, courage, and the finest traditions of the RMMC. If you hadn’t pushed through a promotion already, I’d be asking you to. I would be honored to sign off on the promotion of the man who saved my life.”
“You saved mine first,” Romanov pointed out, his voice quiet and serious. “And after.”
“What happened after I went down?” the Hand asked. “I don’t remember anything after raising the shield.”
“I’m not surprised,” the newly minted Captain told him. “You went down hard once the last salvo of impactors hit. You stopped them, obviously, or neither of us would be here. After that…” He shrugged. “After that, they left. In their place, I’d have assumed you could keep stopping their bombardment.”
“I also shut down their weapons,” Damien said with a harsh cough. Once the coughing fit let up, he half-grinned at Segal’s horrified expression. “We didn’t put backdoors into our ships’ defenses or engines, but yeah, the Hands can shut down your bombardment launchers.”
“If it’s only the bombardment launchers, I’m okay with that, I think,” Segal said beatifically. “Still a nerve-wracking thought, no offense, my lord.”
Damien let the Admiral keep his illusions. His understanding was that he could, if he had the chance to upload the codes, shut down every single offensive system on a Navy ship. Managing to actually upload those codes was extremely unlikely, but he’d assumed that his message would at least be listened to by the strange ship.
He’d guessed right. If he’d guessed wrong, he and a lot of other people would have been dead.
“Inspector Dragic and I went through the wreckage and learned what we could,” Romanov continued after a moment. “Which…wasn’t much. Whoever they were, they thoroughly sanitized every shuttle, every soldier, and every piece of equipment they sent to the surface.
“Dragic is still on Andala IV, pulling together whatever she can, but she sent her initial analysis and samples back with me. They’re currently at the Tau Ceti MIS HQ, undergoing forensics testing with a guard of Marines I absolutely trust.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Damien said quietly. “Well done. What about Andala IV itself?”
“I had a destroyer squadron moving ten minutes after TK-421 made it back here with you,” Segal told him. “Their first return courier arrived after you woke up. There’s been no trouble since—but I’m not moving that squadron, either. This whole mess has me looking for targets painted on my back.”
“I suspect the target is painted on Andala IV and anyone who knows what they found there,” Damien admitted. “Has anyone been briefed on that?”
“On what?” the Admiral asked, with a sharp glance at Romanov.
“It…was my impression that what the Hand found should be regarded as classified,” the Marine Captain said levelly. “I…may have informed Dr. Kael that it was.” He met Damien’s gaze. “No one in Tau Ceti has been briefed, sir.”
Damien sighed and nodded. That was a relief. He needed to talk to the Mage-King before he made a decision on who to tell about the alien runes in the ruins and their nature as the source of Martian Runic.
“Well done, Captain,” he told Romanov.
“Can you tell me what’s going on?” Segal demanded. “I’m a soldier, my lord; I can take ‘you don’t have need to know,’ but someone just tried to blow a planet under my protection to pieces and I’d like to know why!”
“This is classified at the highest level,” Damien told him. “As in don’t tell your staff, don’t tell your wife, don’t even tell another Hand. Understand?”
Segal exhaled, nodding. “How bad is it?” he asked.
“There are alien runes in the lowest levels of the Andala IV base,” the Hand replied. “The higher levels I’m now guessing were intentionally scrubbed of them, but the people doing that work didn’t have access to the lower levels.
“Those runes predate human magic. Hell, I think they may predate human spaceflight—and I’m talking Sputnik here,” Damien warned. “They predate everything…and those runes are written in Martian Runic.”
The Mage-Admiral paused, clearly shocked in mid-thought.
“That’s…”
“Only possible if we got Martian Runic from them, Admiral. If the Eugenicists got the runes they used to identify Mages—the key component of the Olympus Project—from aliens,” Damien said harshly.
“One of the worst and longest forced-breeding experiments in human history, gentlemen. My family didn’t come from that, but both of yours did. We know who to blame for it, but we always wondered where they got the runes. Why they didn’t understand that Olympus Mons was an amplifier.
“But if they were given the runes, and it wasn’t fully explained what they had…a lot makes more sense. On the other hand, if aliens gave the Eugenicists the ability to breed magic into humanity…why did they? What did they want?”
Damien was lost for a moment, remembering the strange ruins with their impossibly familiar magic.
“And if they were in contact with the Eugenicists over three hundred years ago, where did they go?”
“There’s another question too, my lord,” Romanov pointed out. Both of his seniors looked at him and the redheaded Marine shrugged. “These are all key questions—so why is someone willing to kill to stop them being asked?”
Chapter 16
The first place Damien went once Doctor Mohammed finally released him from the hospital was back to the surface of Tau Ceti f and once again to the reassuringly solid mass of the Runic Transceiver Array.
This time, Mage-Captain Romanov had spoken to the facility in advance and sent a platoon of Marines ahead. In the absence of his proper Secret Service detachment—still on their way back from their leave—the Marines had assigned Romanov permanently to Damien, along with an entire company of troops “borrowed” from Duke of Magnificence with Captain Jakab’s blessings.
When Transceiver Elva Santiago met him this time, it was in an empty hallway whose exits were blocked by Royal Martian Marines. Nonetheless, the formally robed Mage seemed utterly unperturbed as she led the Hand to the transmission chamber.
“As last time, we have cleared the secondary receiving chamber, and we have a recorder running in case any side transmissions come in. The recording will be reviewed by Agent Corei and any record of your conversation removed from it before it is passed to us.”
“I apologize for the extra inconvenience,” Damien said quietly. “We have…reason to be paranoid.”
“The Guild exists to serve the Protectorate, Lord Montgomery,” she told him. “If we are told it is a matter of Protectorate Security, we believe you. The primary chamber is waiting for you.”
With a grateful nod to the woman, Damien walked into the shadowed sphere that would allow him to talk to his boss.
#
“Damien,” Desmond Michael Alexander’s voice rumbled into the chamber. “It’s good to hear from you. When the first reports came in after you got back, we were worried.”
“I’m fine and you can tell Kiera and Des that,” Damien replied. He got along well with the Mage-King’s two children, at least when Kiera Michelle Alexander wasn’t teenage-crushing on him and Desmond Michael Alexander the Fourth wasn’t teenage-hero-worshipping him.
Or, well, teenage-crushing on him as well. Eighteen-year-old Des was officially into breaking hearts of both genders. Life in Olympus Mons was always fascinating for Damien.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Damien continued. “I…presumed you’d want to talk to me as soon as I was able. We found something of a mess.”
“You only interrupted me reviewing the latest set of ‘suggestions’ and ‘advice’ from
the Council of the Protectorate,” Alexander said dryly. “I may need to arrange for the Councilors to receive remedial training in ‘not giving orders to their sovereign.’ Some days, I have a lot of sympathy for Charles II attempting to compromise with a Parliament determined to strip him of his power.
“Of course, both Charles and his Parliament were assholes, a problem we are thankfully in shorter supply of on both sides, I think,” the Mage-King finished. “And speaking of orders. What happened on Andala, Damien? That trip was supposed to be a glorified working vacation! Tell me everything.”
Damien obeyed, detailing everything he remembered and everything Dragic and Romanov had reported. Electronic copies of everyone’s reports were aboard couriers headed for Sol that would arrive within a day or so, but even that day could make a huge difference sometimes.
“Damn,” his King said when Damien finished. “And you’re okay?” he demanded. “I’ll admit I’ve never tested whether a Rune Wright could stop an orbital bombardment before.”
“I’m still weak,” Damien admitted. “Even this is taking more energy than I’d like, but I’m recovering. I’m going to get to the bottom of this, sir.”
He paused, considering. If there was anyone in this galaxy he trusted, it was his King, but someone had, so far as he could tell, dropped Martian Marines on his head.
“Sir…did you know?” he asked. “That our runes were alien in origin? That our magic was alien in origin?”
The transceiver chamber was silent for a long moment.
“I can understand why you have to ask,” Alexander replied. “No, Damien. I didn’t know. And no, I’m not aware of a covert special ops team using our tech and our training to murder people who might find out.”
“I wasn’t going to ask,” Damien told his boss. He had wondered, but he hadn’t been that far gone into his paranoia. Yet.
“The first Mage-King, my grandfather, might have known,” the third Mage-King admitted. “But…he was dead before I was born. My father was a child of his second century, and both of them ruled for a hundred years. Remember that my grandfather was…a strong man, a good man—but also a man who was used as a stud stallion for seven years.
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