Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) (11 page)

“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 bent 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 damage
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.”

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.

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.