Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) (28 page)

“Fire in the hole!”

Damien felt the ground tremble and waited for the MIS demo team to check the area before going around the corner himself. The overly neat basement of the CCU building was now covered in concrete dust, and the secret door Amiri had found had been blasted off its hinges.

The other side looked like a…garage. It was dustier and clearly less well maintained than the basement behind them, but it had clearly held a vehicle of some kind for a long time. A dimly lit tunnel stretched away from them, marked with a clear set of tire tracks in the dirt.

“Find where this comes out,” he ordered.

“Yes, sir,” the Martian Investigation Service team lead replied, gesturing one of his people forward with a small airborne drone. “It’s probably not too far,” he concluded. “Maybe two klicks at most; more than that would be unsafe.”

And two kilometers would have put Raptis well outside the perimeter established by the Curiosity City cops.

He called Director Wong and quickly filled her in.

“We’ll try and backtrack the time once we have the exit point,” she told him after she’d processed it. “But…that line goes through downtown. If it emerges into a parking garage, without knowing what the vehicle
looks
like, we won’t have much of a trail.

“Find what you can, Director,” he replied. “I don’t demand the impossible, merely the extremely difficult.”

“We’ll do what we must. I have a team breaking down the door of Raptis’s house as we speak. We’ll rip the place apart; hopefully, we’ll find some kind of clue.”

“Hopefully,” Damien echoed. “I don’t suppose we have full records of aerial travel?”

“We can scan them, but there’s enough private short-range flight that we can’t guarantee an unscheduled flight was a risk.”

“Check,” he ordered. “We’ll want to investigate them anyway.”

“We’ll find Raptis, my lord,” she promised. “This is
Mars
. No one can evade us here.”

Damien wasn’t sure he believed that anymore, but he nodded anyway.

#

Damien had returned to his shuttle, studying what information he had and trying to decide his next move, when the datapulse arrived. Anything from Christoffsen was flagged for his immediate attention, and he threw it onto the shuttle’s cockpit screen to study what the old man had sent.

The cover note was short and abrupt, noting that the land parcel shown had been transferred to the ex-Eugenicist Caleb Octavian—Lawrence Octavian’s great-great-great-grandfather—on the same date that the Royal Order of the Keepers of Secrets and Oaths had been created by order of the first Mage-King.

“Director Wong,” he raised the MIS woman again. “I need you to run a satellite scan for me.”

“We’re still digging through the data for flights leaving here,” she replied. “What do you need?”

“I’m sending you an area of the Hellas Montes Park,” he told her. “Did any of those unscheduled aircraft go there?”

She was silent for a long moment.

“Yes,” she said finally. “This makes no sense, my lord. A helicopter left a downtown rooftop helipad roughly as you were arriving at the University. They went directly into the park and appear to have landed…but there’s nothing
there
. Just…wilderness.”

“Give me the coordinates,” Damien ordered. “Then…continue your investigation of the house and the tunnel, but I think you can mostly stand down. If you’ve got where Raptis landed, your part in this is done.”

“We’ll remain on standby regardless,” Wong told him. “We’ll see what we find.”

It was time to call in the Marines. Romanov was busy, but it wasn’t like
Duke of Magnificence
didn’t have two
other
Marine companies he could call on. He was reaching out to raise Mage-Captain Jakab when a planetwide alert slammed onto his wrist PC.

“This is Admiral Amanda Caliver aboard
Defender of Mars
,” the voice of the woman in charge of the orbiting battleships announced, and he realized that
every
military and police comm on the planet was receiving the transmission. “The Mountain is under attack. Unknown forces have disabled both the geothermal and fusion power plants in Olympus Mons, crippling the interior and exterior defenses.

“A secondary series of attacks appear to have disabled Olympus City’s power plants as well.

“I am declaring a humanitarian and security crisis. All military personnel are to report to base immediately. All police forces are to move to secure their local areas and stand by to provide support to OCPD and the Royal Marines.

“We will be launching Marine landings into Olympus City and to reinforce the Mountain’s defenders immediately. Stand by for individual instructions via your local chain of command.

“Until further notice, Mars is now under martial law.”

And Damien Montgomery was
not
getting his Marines
or
police backup.

He’d been worried about an attack on Christoffsen. He’d forgotten that Winton had threatened the
Mage-King
.

#

Julia listened to the message and, without a word aloud, gestured for her Secret Service agents to follow her into the shuttle. They settled in behind her as she dropped in beside Montgomery.

“What’s the plan?” she asked.

“We should head to Olympus Mons, make sure Desmond and the rest are safe,” he replied slowly.

“And would you, powerful as you are, make a difference when the Mage-King is surrounded by hundreds of Marines and Secret Service Agents and the Royal Guard? Hell, Desmond himself is a walking weapon of mass destruction.”

“If the King is under attack, we have a duty.”

“And what if that’s what the Keepers are counting on?” she told him. From what she could tell, the Hand was closing in on the bastards who’d bombed Andala and killed Kurosawa. They had to be running scared. “If they’re keeping secrets, they probably have records of some kind? The kind they’d need a huge distraction to move without people noticing?”

“A distraction like martial law and having every man and woman in uniform on the goddamn planet watching the Mountain,” he said quietly.

“Exactly. Damien, our King is
probably
safe and
certainly
doesn’t need you,” she pointed out. Her charge had a bad habit of swinging between thinking he was completely unimportant and thinking he had to solve
everything
.

“But no one else has all the pieces we’ve put together,” she continued. “What if they’re running scared? How close are we?”

“We have them,” he admitted quietly. “Christoffsen tracked a land grant that was buried in the middle of a park, made to the first Mage Octavian—a defected Eugenicist. It was made the same day that the Keepers were established.

“A chopper left here without a flight plan and headed right to that land grant. I have coordinates that I think are their base. Their home. Most likely their records, as you say.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” she demanded. “This shuttle has enough fuel to make it to orbit and back twice; we can do a nice short suborbital, can’t we?”

“We can.”

“Then let’s go end this fucking case so I can go get married, shall we?”

He chuckled.

“Strap in, people,” he ordered. “Apparently, our bride-to-be is getting impatient.”

#

Hand lights flickered to life across the Archives, accompanied by panicked questions and shouting from the researchers, none of whom had expected to see the perfectly safe underground cavern have
any
problems.

“What’s going on?” was the primary refrain.

“Everyone,
shut up!
” Denis bellowed. “Lights to the center, check on the civilians. Perimeter teams, go thermal. Watch the doors, watch your backs,” he ordered.

With some order beginning to form around him, he turned his attention back to Christoffsen and Guardsman Han.

“What happened?” he asked the exosuited soldier.

“Something cut the primary, secondary, and tertiary power systems,” she reported. “The trembling was explosives collapsing the boreholes for the geothermal plant. I’m not sure what shut down the fusion and fission plants, but given that the thorium reactors’
existence
is classified, that’s concerning on its own.”

“Should you be going to protect His Majesty?” Denis asked.

“I’m in contact with Guard Control,” she reported. “They have battery power, but the thorium fission plants are supposed to provide our final emergency power source. The Mage-King is secure, the Throne Room is secure, the kids are with him. If the King is in the Throne Room, any attack on him won’t work.

“Frankly, Mage-Captain, you and the Professor are more vulnerable, and since the Professor just cracked open the damn Keepers like a crab dinner, I think everyone would prefer we kept
him
alive.”

“Wait,” Denis said slowly, “you think someone knocked out power to the entire complex as a preamble to attacking
us
?”

“It’s sufficiently likely that I’ve been ordered to secure the Archives and protect Dr. Christoffsen,” she said calmly. “Just in case.”

There was no subtlety to arriving in a shuttle, even a small unarmed runabout like the one Damien had taken to Curiosity City. The spacecraft came screaming in on the coordinates Wong had identified, still traveling at the speed of sound as they entered the parcel of land belonging to the Octavian family in the middle of a planetary park.

“I’m not seeing anything here,” Amiri told him from the copilot’s seat. “Just…trees.”

“Slowing down over the last spot the satellites had the chopper,” he replied, looking out through the cockpit as the shuttle came to something more reasonable as he looped around. “Wait—what’s that?”

“That” was a glint of metal through the trees. His bodyguard had clearly seen it as well and started tapping commands on the screen as he directed the shuttle in the direction of the glint.

“Son of a bitch,” she murmured as he brought the shuttle through a break in the trees and into a hover above a three-quarters-full vehicle park.

A helicopter—presumably the one whose trail they’d followed—still sat in the middle of a concrete landing pad. Half a dozen robotic tow trucks sat silently off to one side, and a cleared zone tucked against the side of the mountain held another five choppers and half a dozen shuttles identical to the one Damien was piloting.

“Those are all government spacecraft,” Damien said quietly. “We found our target.”

“This thing has no guns,” she told him. “That’s a
lot
of vehicles to leave behind you.”

“It’s an orbital shuttle,” he reminded her. “It doesn’t
need
guns for this.”

With a carefully calculated course, he swept the spacecraft down through the vehicle park, suspending the shuttle barely five meters above the ground and directed the thrusters at each vehicle as he swept over.

On full power at that range, engines that could lift the craft from the ground to orbit
melted
steel and overheated ceramics to the point of shattering. The shuttles had apparently been at least partially fueled, as explosions buffeted Damien’s craft as he swept back around, making certain none of the vehicles were intact.

No one was going to escape today. After Andala, after
Keeper of Oaths
and the dead aboard
Duke of Magnificence
…the Keepers would surrender or be destroyed.

“Got a bead on the entrance?” he asked.

“There’s a path leading up the mountain,” Amiri replied. “It’s the only manmade feature I can see, so I’m guessing that’s the way to our door.”

Damien adjusted the shuttle, landing the slightly scorched but intact spacecraft in a clear space away from the wrecked vehicles around him.

“We’ve already knocked. Let’s go find the door.”

#

Once they were outside and on the ground, the path leading up the mountain was clear and obvious. Someone had put a
lot
of effort into cultivating and trimming the trees around the landing pad and vehicle park to conceal the facility as much as possible. If they hadn’t known exactly where the helicopter had disappeared, Damien wasn’t sure they could have found the place.

The path was similarly concealed but was a smoothly paved straight line under the trees. It ascended smoothly up the mountainside, though the tree canopy arching over it blocked his view of the destination.

There were no signs, no people. The only noise was the crackling fires of the wrecked vehicles. He’d have to call the site into the Park Rangers once they were done to make sure the fire didn’t spread, but for now…

Silence.

He looked up the path, absently recognizing the natural beauty of the place the Keepers had made their own. Damien suspected what waited for him inside their base. He didn’t want to be right, but he steeled himself for it anyway.

“Julia,” he said quietly, gesturing Amiri to him. “I want you to take your people and fly the shuttle back to Olympus Mons. The autopilot can handle that.”

“Not a chance,” she replied sharply. “You need us to watch your back.”

“Not today.” He shook his head. “Julia, you’re one of the few who know what it means for a Rune Wright to go to war. I can’t be responsible for your safety.”

“You’ll still die if someone shoots you in the back of the head.”

“And if I and whoever I end up fighting start throwing antimatter around?” he asked softly. “I can protect myself, but if I’m protecting you and your people as well, I might just get us all killed.”

“Until this case is done, my job is to keep you alive,” she snapped. “I will
not
abandon you.”

“Your part in this case is done,” he stated flatly. “Julia, I don’t need you for this. Having you here will put both you and me at risk. Go. You can help more at Olympus Mons than here—and you can make sure that whatever happens, His Majesty knows where this place is.”

“And if you die?”

“Then I died doing my job and I didn’t take you with me,” Damien told her. “You’ve watched my back for a long time, Julia. I don’t even know how many lives I owe you, but you can’t watch my back today. I
need
you to go back to the Mountain and tell Desmond what we’ve found.

“I need you to go back to Ardennes, no matter what happens, and help Riordan put his planet back together,” he admitted. “This… This is up to me.”

“
Why
?” she demanded. She wasn’t arguing anymore—both of them knew it was an order he would not permit her to refuse.

“Because unless I’m severely mistaken, I’m going to find a Hand in there,” he told her quietly. “And that’s something we need to deal with in the family.”

#

As Damien stepped under the trees, the shuttle engines roared to life behind him. The little runabout was designed to function entirely without a pilot. Its computer was entirely capable of taking Amiri and her people back to Olympus Mons on its own, which meant
they
would be safe.

His own fate was an entirely different question.

The path was wide and clear, obviously carefully maintained—probably by robots, from the ruler-straight edges of the shrubs and lower branches that touched it. The evening sunlight was streaming through the canopy, tinging the concrete path with a calming shade of green as he made his way up the side of the mountain.

It was incongruous at best. Damien was here to fight a war, to end a conspiracy that had killed people under his command, tried to kill thousands of innocents—
had
killed God alone knew how many people protecting their secrets.

But the path leading up to their secret library was a soothing, relaxing place that managed to do
nothing
for his peace of mind. Knowing what was coming made it creepy.

Finally, after about a quarter-kilometer, he reached the end of the path. An opening had been cut into the side of the mountain with magic, angled to be invisible from above, containing a large set of double doors surmounted by a sigil of a mailed fist holding a scroll.

The symbol was the only sign he was in the right place. There was no text, no explanation, just a set of armored doors in the middle of nowhere with that symbol carved into the stone above them.

His arrival had not been subtle. He was a little surprised nothing had tried to shoot at him on approach, but he had certainly made his presence known. The Keepers knew he was there. They knew who he was, more than any enemy he’d ever faced, he suspected.

With a deep inhalation and a surge of magic, Damien Montgomery, Hand of the Mage-King of Mars, blew the doors apart and strode into the lair of his enemy.