Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

“And hence why you can get away with it,” the Mage-Captain told him, shaking his head as he made his way to his desk and gestured for Damien to sit. “What can I do for you, my lord?”

  “Our investigations here have mostly drawn a blank,” the Hand admitted. “It’s time for me to return to Mars and for our investigation into the attack on Andala IV to proceed in Sol. Given the events in Andala, I’d rather return aboard Duke. How long until she’s ready to fly?”

  “We made it here under our own power,” Jakab pointed out. “I could kick all of the yard staff out and be underway in twelve hours.”

  “Which will leave you short, what? A quarter of your missile launchers still?” Damien asked.

  “They’re all installed,” the Captain replied. “We could do the final hookups ourselves.”

  “Assuming I let you finish your repairs, how long until you can fly?”

  “A week,” Jakab told him. “We’re already at the point where all of the work that requires the hull to be open is done. We’re mostly on aligning and hookups now, but when you’re talking about systems that handle gigaton-range warheads, this needs to be done carefully.”

  “We can spare a week,” Damien said. “I’m waiting on Professor Christoffsen anyway; he wasn’t planning on being back until your repairs were done, anyway.”

  “Our repairs will be complete on schedule,” the Captain replied. “We can accelerate a few days if needed.”

  “A week is fine, Captain.”

  “Thank you, my lord.” Jakab paused. “You and your staff are back aboard then?”

  “We are,” Damien confirmed. “We’re…still short Secret Service people until we’re back on Mars, so I’m probably going to keep Romanov for a bit.”

  “That’s fine,” the Captain told him. “You’ll also want to meet with Lieutenant Commander Anita Torres. She’s the head of your new flag deck staff.” The Captain smiled. “I took the liberty of arranging for us to take on a military team for you as we finished repairs; Torres is actually on the flag deck now, checking to see if she needs to make any changes or updates while we still have a shipyard at hand.”

  Damien had completely forgotten about the suggestion that he take on a Navy staff to support his security team and political staff and allow him to fully utilize Duke of Magnificence’s flag deck instead of interfering directly from Jakab’s bridge.

  “Well, that sounds like the best place for me to touch base with her,” he said. “Do you need anything from me, Captain?”

  “Not today,” the cruiser commander replied. “I’d like to be briefed on whatever you have on the ship at Andala before we leave, though. Somehow, I suspect I’ll be meeting her.”

  #

  Despite having living aboard Duke of Magnificence for almost a year, Damien had only set foot on the flag deck once, when he’d received his initial tour. He was very familiar with the regular bridge, though, and the flag deck was one short stairwell away.

  The two major command centers for the warship were ninety seconds’ brisk walk apart. At a run, abusing magic to control gravity, Damien figured he could make it under twenty if he had to. Since the bridge was also the simulacrum chamber that allowed access to the amplifier, that wasn’t an irrelevant point.

  Like the bridge, the flag deck was sealed away behind heavy security hatches. Seeing them open for once, Damien realized he’d walked past the flag deck at least a dozen times without realizing it was there—closed hatches, even security ones, were not uncommon enough aboard the ship to draw attention on their own.

  Today, though, the hatch was open and a fire team of four Marines stood guard outside it. All four wore the shoulder flashes of Romanov’s new company, which had been all but permanently assigned to Damien’s security. Having an entire company of over a hundred of Mars’s finest ground troops acting as glorified bodyguards bothered him, but he was no longer able to pretend he didn’t need security.

  “Lieutenant Commander Torres is inside, my lord,” the Corporal in charge informed him. “We’re to keep everyone else out until she’s finished her inspection.”

  “Does that include me?” Damien asked.

  “She didn’t exempt you, but we work for you, not her,” the NCO pointed out with a laugh. “Go right on in.”

  With a smile, Damien strode past the Marines and into Duke of Magnificence’s flag deck. It was a smaller room than he’d perhaps expected, only about two thirds the size of the bridge below it and circular where the amplifier matrix required the bridge to be the same shape as the ship.

  While the flag deck lacked the runes that linked the bridge into the amplifier, it had been otherwise designed in a similar fashion. The floor, walls and ceiling were covered in high-resolution screens that, when active, would show the world outside the ship as if you were suspended in deep space. Right now, they were turned off, faded to a dull gray that told no one anything.

  A ring of consoles around the outside of the room showed where the Admiral’s—or in this case, Damien’s—support staff would work. A spherical hologram tank, easily three meters across, sat at the exact center of the flag deck, with a large chair festooned with controls next to it for the Admiral themselves to control the main display.

  Unlike the all-surrounding displays, the holographic tank was online. The three-dimensional image was split into thirds. One third of it was showing an update on a self-diagnostic, another third showed space around Duke of Magnificence, and the last was focused on the construction slips for Thunder and her sisters.

  Sitting in the Admiral’s chair was a dumpy woman with dark frizzy hair in a Navy uniform. She wasn’t quite overweight, but she was probably pushing even the Navy’s physical fitness requirements. She was focused on the holographic tank, her gaze and attention flickering between sections even as she used the controls in the command chair to manipulate the data in front of her.

  “Lieutenant Commander Torres, I take it?” Damien said loudly when he realized she wasn’t paying enough attention to see him standing there.

  Torres jerked upright, flinging herself out of the chair into a credible approximation of full attention and a sharp salute.

  “My Lord Hand! I didn’t see you there.”

  “At ease, Torres,” Damien said dryly. “I’m hardly offended you took my chair. How’s the flag deck looking?”

  For a moment, it looked like the woman was trembling, and then she managed to get herself mostly under control.

  “We’ll need to do some work,” she finally told him. “Duke’s flag deck hasn’t been actively operated since she was commissioned, and it looks like she missed an entire generation of hardware updates. The software updates are straightforward and the main display is usable, but we need to tear out all of the support consoles.”

  “How long and what’s the difference?” Damien asked.

  “Some of it’s only incremental improvements, and most of the processing power pulls from Duke herself, but the updates can easily make a twenty percent improvement in the efficiency of your staff,” she told him crisply. “Perhaps more important is that the staff I’m bringing over to support you is used to working with the new equipment and will face a noticeable learning curve catching up to the old gear.”

  “And how long to replace them?” he repeated.

  “Five days,” she replied. “They’re canned modules; I can have the old ones out and the new ones in before the rest of the repairs are done.”

  Impressed, Damien nodded.

  “Go ahead, then,” he ordered. If nothing else, it would give him the ability to assess the ability of his new naval chief of staff. “Now we’ve covered the hardware, yourself.”

  “Myself?” she asked.

  “I am sure that with the Navy’s usual efficiency, I will at some point receive your full record,” he said. “I haven’t yet. Summarize for me. Where were you transferred from, and what are your qualifications?”

  Torres swallowed and nodded.

  “I was promoted to Lieutenant Com
mander six weeks ago,” she began. “Prior to that, I was the junior operations officer for Mage-Admiral Segal’s staff for two years. Before that, I was junior tactical officer aboard the destroyer Just Sword of Freedom.

  “Mage-Admiral Segal selected me personally to command your staff less than a week ago,” she noted. “I…understand that I replaced someone else he didn’t know directly. I am not sure of the reasons why, but I was told you would understand.”

  It seemed Mage-Admiral Segal was starting to share Damien’s paranoia.

  “I have two years’ experience as direct deputy to Mage-Admiral Segal’s Chief of Staff as we operated the Tau Ceti Station,” she continued. “While I am certain there are more qualified officers available, the Mage-Admiral selected me as…a matter of trust.”

  “The Mage-Admiral understands my top concern at the moment,” he told her. “What about the staff you’re bringing with you?”

  “I have four junior officers and sixteen technicians who will be joining us inside the next five days,” she replied. “All sixteen ratings and petty officers are being transferred directly from Mage-Admiral Segal’s staff. Two of the officers are from there as well; the other two are from Righteous Guardian of Liberty with Mage-Commodore Adamant’s compliments.

  “My understanding was that our priority was to find competent personnel we trusted completely,” she finished. “My lord…” She paused. “I’ve always assumed that Navy personnel could be trusted, but the Mage-Admiral was acting like we couldn’t trust anyone we didn’t know ourselves. What’s going on?”

  “Send in your order for the flag deck repairs,” Damien ordered. “Then meet me in my office. If you’re going to work for me, Lieutenant Commander, it appears we’re going to have to fully brief you.”

  Chapter 26

  Damien spent the week waiting for something else to go wrong. To his surprise, it went without incident or interruption. Torres saw to the updating of the flag deck and the arrival of his new Navy staff with practiced efficiency. The repairs to the battlecruiser progressed around him, and finally, on the day before the repairs were supposed to be complete, Dr. Robert Christoffsen finally returned aboard.

  When the pudgy, balding older man finally arrived in Damien’s office, the Hand looked him over critically. Christoffsen held multiple PhDs in political and legal science and had been Governor of the Tara System—a Core World—earlier in life.

  Now the Hand’s political advisor, he was into his nineties, and even a few weeks seemed to have sapped his vitality.

  “Are you all right, Professor?” he asked.

  “My vacation in the sun and waves on Tara turned into a week-long emergency consultation with the latest Governor,” Christoffsen told him. “My successor had a heart attack on us, and his Vice-Governor felt…unsure of herself. A week of backing her up seems to have everything back on an even keel, but it was hardly relaxing.”

  “No rest for the wicked, I see,” Damien said. “You’re not exactly coming back to work at the easiest time, either.”

  “I reviewed the briefing paper your Torres pulled together,” the political advisor noted. “I assume there are aspects she wasn’t cleared for?”

  “I brushed over how we survived the bombardment and how I knew the runes were Martian Runic,” Damien admitted. “She’s not aware of the existence of Rune Wrights, and until I’m more comfortable with her, that isn’t changing. Unfortunately, it appears our enemies are aware of Rune Wrights—and that I am one.”

  “That’s a complicating factor,” Christoffsen agreed. He grabbed a chair and took a seat, eyeing the construction yards through the observation window. “A lot of complicating factors this time around. A conspiracy at the heart of Mars?”

  “I don’t exactly want to believe it myself,” Damien admitted.

  His political aide laughed.

  “Politics on Mars aren’t pretty, my young friend,” Christoffsen told him. “There’s cabals and parties and factions galore. If you were going home to rest, they wouldn’t be your problem. Desmond is perfectly capable of handling them himself.

  “But if we’re going hunting on Mars, you can’t afford to be politically naïve,” he finished flatly. “It sounds like our enemies hide in the Mountain, which makes this whole mess even more politically charged.”

  Damien stepped up to the transparent steel of his office window and looked out over the yards once again. From there, the core space station that guarded the yards and Tau Ceti e was clearly visible, a sign of the power and will of humanity overcoming any danger.

  “Give me the highlights,” he ordered.

  “That could take a week.”

  “We don’t have that kind of time,” Damien said. “Skim the top for me.”

  The ex-Governor sighed.

  “Remember that every conflict in the Protectorate seems to come to Mage versus Mundane,” he said. “The Compact gives Mages certain rights and responsibilities, and whether they are too much or not enough is a constant source of tension.

  “Mirroring that tension has always been the push-and-pull between the Council of the Protectorate and the Mage-King. One hundred and five Councilors, one for each world. They technically serve an advisory purpose and the Mage-King decides everything, as limited by the Charter and his ability to convince the system governments to buy in.

  “In practice, Desmond and his father have both used the Council to make sure that the system governments will buy in, and the Council has effectively been writing our legislation for fifty years. That, however, is not part of their role under the Charter, so it’s entirely at the Mage-King’s discretion.”

  Christoffsen fiddled with his PC for a moment and threw a projection on the window of the one hundred and five worlds of the Protectorate, highlighting sections as he kept speaking.

  “Forty-five of the Councilors are either directly loyal to the Mage-King or in agreement with his current agenda,” he noted. “Those forty-five will usually vote as he wants. Fourteen are from the UnArcana worlds. They’re fighting us on everything right now.”

  “They can’t really admit that Legatus is behind our current spate of rebellions and piracy, can they?” Damien asked.

  “No, they claim to just want us to spend less money,” Christoffsen said dryly. “They have some support in that, but it’s the system governments who have the right to deny the Navy funding—and they’re all terrified.”

  “So, we have Loyalists and the UnArcana blocs.” Damien tapped the lit up symbols on the window. “That’s barely half the Council. Who else?”

  “The Legislaturists,” his aide replied. “They’re going to be the problem. They’re the ones who want to rewrite the Charter to explicitly give the Council the right to write legislation, not the Mage-King. The smart ones realize Desmond has to have a veto, but some appear to think that the Council should be the true government of the Protectorate, not the Mage-King.

  “There are thirty-six Legislaturists,” he concluded. “The remaining ten Councilors are more concerned with their planets’ needs than the Council’s infighting.”

  “So, that’s the ground I’m on,” Damien said quietly.

  “It’s more than that, Damien. Remember that many see you as not merely a Hand but as an adoptive member of the Alexander family,” Christoffsen told him. “You are young for a Hand, photogenic, and keep acting like a goddamn hero. You are the single most visible symbol of the monarchy after Desmond the Third himself.

  “Everything you do in Sol will reflect not merely on the Mountain but directly on Alexander himself. You walk into dangerous waters, with shadowy enemies, and every eye on you.” The older man shook his head. “I’m not sure I can guide you through this minefield, Damien.”

  “We’ll do the best we can and deal with the consequences as they fall,” the Hand said. “Do you know anything about this Royal Order of the Keepers of Secrets and Oaths?”

  “No,” the other man admitted. “If there are any records of them anywhere, it’s in th
e Archives at Olympus Mons. Unfortunately, I’m forced to agree with His Majesty—it is entirely possible that his grandfather did create this Order and did task them to keep everything we knew about these aliens secret.”

  “They suggested they might have to overthrow Desmond now he was hunting them,” Damien pointed out. “I don’t care how different Desmond the Third and the First are, I doubt the man who established a monarchy at the point of a Mage-led battle fleet would tolerate anyone turning on his grandson.”

  “No,” Christoffsen agreed. “We’ll deal with them, Damien.”

  “Of course we will,” the Hand replied with a confidence he didn’t feel. “That’s the damned job, isn’t it?”

  Chapter 27

  When Duke of Magnificence finally made her way out the repair slip that had been her home for over a month, rebuilding the armor, systems and weapons lost under Damien’s command, the Hand was aboard her flag deck, watching everything take place around him.

  Despite the upgrades, the room didn’t look particularly different to him. The big holo-tank in the center had been left unchanged, as had the command chair with its touch screens and displays, now linked into his personal computer.

  One of the consoles that formed a ring around the holo-tank was Torres’s—the one with the nicest chair, apparently—but for the moment, she was standing next to Damien, walking him through the menus for his chair’s screens and the big tank itself.

  “The menus and commands are kept as intuitive as possible,” she told him. “They’re designed for Admirals and such who…” She paused, clearly searching for a polite way to describe it. “Who don’t have time to take retraining courses,” she concluded.

  Damien chuckled. That was a polite way of pointing out that Admirals were not the easiest beasts to direct and generally would want things shaped to them instead of the other way around.

  “It’s simpler than the controls to fly Duke herself, and I can do that,” he pointed out. “I’ll be fine, and if I’m not”—he gestured at the junior officers and enlisted who now held stations at the consoles—“there are a dozen of you here to help me through it.”