Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) (29 page)

Damien had no idea if the doors had been locked, but they had been armored to withstand almost any conventional weapon. Converting half a gram or so of the metal at the exact center of the door to antimatter, however, was far more than any mundane material could withstand.

He strode through the shattered wreckage of the doors, summoning shields of force around himself to stop any bullets from unexpected corners. The shields couldn’t be sustained forever, but while he held them, it would take more than a bullet to the head to stop him.

The double doors led into a small antechamber with another set of doors at the other end. The space was carved out of the raw rock, with gentle lighting showing delicate woodland murals painted across the smoothed stone. The inner doors were armored to the same level as the outer doors and he glanced around for defenses.

There weren’t any. Just the doors. With a gesture, he blew
those
apart inwards, clearing his immediate path, and stepped over the debris into an immense open lobby.

If the space had started as a natural cavern, there was no sign of it anymore. Easily two hundred meters long and fifteen high, supported by immense pillars and marked with second- and third-floor galleries, the space looked like it should be the heart of a museum, not the entrance to a secret underground base. It was massive enough that the debris from the wrecked doors hadn’t actually
touched
anything in the room.

Mirrored airshafts in the roof delivered sunshine, diffusing a mix of natural and artificial light to fully illuminate the massive space with a consistent level of light that glittered off glass cases and covered bookshelves.

The place
was
a museum. Artifacts and books that no one outside this deathly secret order had ever seen or even known existed. Knowledge hidden away—Damien couldn’t even
guess
how important it was, how much knowledge of the origins of magic had been concealed from humanity.

There were hundreds of hiding places in the room and he held his shields as he walked forward into the center of the room. He could
feel
the eyes on him, and he stopped in the middle of the room and waited.

His Sight told him he wasn’t alone. Even amidst the runic artifacts hidden in the cases, he could See the runes of the Mages around him…and the Rune of Power ahead of him.

“I know you’re here,” he said aloud. “I know you know what I am, so that can’t be a surprise.

“Your ‘Royal Order’ is guilty of treason and mass murder,” he continued. “If you lay down your arms and submit to the Mage-King’s justice, he may be merciful. Yield or be destroyed.”

For a long moment, silence was his only answer and he began to reach for his power. If they would not answer, then he would
make them
.

Then the Rune of Power ahead of him shifted. A black-clad figure emerged from behind a column on the second floor gallery and jumped the railing. With the tiniest of bursts of magic, Charlotte Ndosi landed gently on the floor in front of him.

He’d guessed.

No. He’d
known
. Lomond had clearly known nothing, and yet everything suggested there was a Hand on Mars funneling the Keepers information. If it wasn’t Lomond and it wasn’t Damien, then Ndosi was the only option.

“I’d hoped it wasn’t you,” he said quietly.

“This still doesn’t have to end in violence,” she replied.

“Only if you lay down your arms and surrender,” Damien told her. “Your Order has gone too far. Bombarding a planet? Ambushing a Hand? Launching missiles in
Mars local space
?!”

“I doubt it matters, but no one here knew what Octavian was doing,” Ndosi replied. “And I don’t have a goddamn
clue
who put those missiles there, Damien. But you’ve chased us since you came back, and I swore an oath to defend the secrets of this Order.”

“Even from your King?” he demanded. “Even to the point of attacking Olympus Mons?”

“A distraction,” she told him. “We wanted to take Christoffsen into custody, try and convince him to see our side, but you’d wrapped too much security around him. We needed to keep the
rest
of the Mountain away from our capture team.”

She sighed.

“If it makes you feel any better, those capture teams were called off when you started slagging our escape vehicles. The whole point in neutralizing Dr. Christoffsen, after all, was to stop him leading you to here, and the distraction will help us evacuate the place anyway.”

“What is this place?” he asked.

“The Secret Library, the place where we stored everything Desmond Michael Alexander felt he had to keep hidden. He was right,” she concluded. “You don’t know what you’ve scratched the surface of, Damien. You could destroy the Protectorate if you unveiled what we protect.

“Please…join us,” she asked. “We could explain everything. You will understand then.”

Her eyes said, unspoken, that they could be together then.

“Lawrence Octavian dropped kinetic weapons on an archaeological dig site,” Damien said quietly. “Your ‘Winton’, whatever his real name is, kidnapped and threatened an eighteen-year-old girl to force me to talk to him. Hell, he offered me the Throne in the Mountain. Threatened the Mage-King of Mars to whom we both owe our allegiance.

“Your Order, whatever its reason, whatever its purpose, has gone too far. It’s over, Hand Ndosi. Stand down or be destroyed.”

“I swore an oath, Damien,” she said quietly. “And like you said, we know what you are.”

She gestured for him to look behind him.

The Mages emerged from behind columns on each level. At least twenty, all marked with the projector rune of a Combat Mage. Against any conventional threat, even against a
Hand
, it was overkill—especially backed
by
a Hand. Against Damien… He wasn’t sure even he could win that fight.

“Please, Damien,” she said softly. “We serve the same cause; we just have more information than you do. There’s a
reason
this stuff is secret.”

“A Hand threatening another Hand,” Damien replied. “An attack on the Mountain by our own people. What would Alaura have said?”

Ndosi winced. Alaura Stealey had recruited and trained them both. She’d been one of the best Hands of their generation in Damien’s opinion, and she would have been heartbroken to learn one of her pupils had fallen this deeply into treason.

The other Hand looked conflicted for a long moment. As she opened her mouth to say something, however, several of the Mages took advantage of Damien’s distraction.

Out of nowhere, fire and lightning hammered his shields, the force sending him flying even as his shield absorbed enough heat and kinetic energy to protect him from harm.

Steadying himself behind his shield, he summoned the full array of his power. The time for talking was over.

#

More fire lashed across the room with deadly focus, the deadly beams ripping into the column Damien had landed behind as he took cover. His shields were strong, but against twenty Mages, even a Rune Wright could sustain a defense for only so long.

His attackers reacted to his attempt to hide by opening fire with grenade launchers. They were
very
willing to wreck their own library to kill him, it seemed.

At least half a dozen of the weapons bounced around the corner toward him, but he deflected them away with a blast of force and charged after them. The explosions covered his emergence from behind the stone column, allowing him to quickly assess the threats.

The Mages were working in teams of five, focusing both magical and weapons fire on particular locations as they tried to sweep him. Ndosi was on her own, but her Rune made her the largest threat. She hadn’t, so far as he could tell, attacked him yet…and even in the middle of a battle, he couldn’t bring himself to strike first against a woman he’d slept with.

Instead, he targeted the team of Mages on the third-floor gallery. Power surged through him and he
ripped
the balcony from the walls, flinging a hundred tons of stone—and five Mages—across the room at another of the teams, crushing eight of his attackers with a single strike.

“He’s moving!” a voice screamed. “
Take him!
”

Twelve beams of force and fired slammed into his shields simultaneously, a skilled unison that drove him back once more. He gave way a few steps, preparing another attack—and then a brutally powerful force strike slammed through Mages’ attacks, flinging him off his feet and against the wall.

He’d never fought a Hand before, and he struggled against the sheer power of Ndosi’s will for a moment. Even under the pressure of her attack, however, he was able to stop her Mages’ attacks from reaching him—and theirs, unlike the Hand’s, were
lethal
strikes.

Ndosi was still trying to take him alive. She should have known better.

Damien focused power and turned his shield into a mirror, reflecting
every
attack back in a flash of magic that overrode the other Mages’ control of their Gifts. The reflection lasted bare moments and took more energy than jumping a starship, but faced with this many Mages, it
worked.

Energy hammered into walls and pillars,
most
of his attackers dodging or defending themselves. Despite a growing sense of fatigue, he followed up the deflection with strikes of his own, tight beams of superheated plasma that cut through magical shields, flesh, and the stone of the columns they tried to hide behind.

One of the columns collapsed under the strain as his attacks sliced through it, its unimaginable weight ripping it free from the roof as it was severed from the base. Hundreds of tons of stone crashed to the floor of the massive chamber, the ground itself shaking, glass cases and bookshelf fronts shattering in a crescendo of noise.

Over half of his opponents were down now, but the survivors opened up with grenade launchers again. With the ground itself trembling under Damien’s feet as part of the library roof came down, he missed the weapons until it was too late.

Six high-explosive grenades bracketed him and detonated at close range within a second of each other. His shields compressed under the impact, energy backlashing into him with overwhelming heat and force.

Somehow,
somehow
, he held it together—even as the backlash drove him to his knees. He began to rise, only to be hit by a follow-up salvo of magic. His shields stopped
most
of it before collapsing, but one beam of fire slammed into his shoulder.

Force and heat flung him across the room again, and he used his own magic to carry himself farther, crashing down mostly safely into one of the piles of debris, buying himself a moment of time.

Before he could
do
anything with it, however, a force field settled onto him, pressing him onto the ground. Looking up, he wasn’t surprised to see Ndosi approaching him, her hands outstretched and her Rune of Power flaring with light and energy as she pinned him in place.

“Yield, Damien,” she ordered. The surviving Mages were behind her, adding their own strength to the spell holding him in place. “Even you have limits. Even you can die. I don’t want to kill you.”

He relaxed under the magic, feeling into the weave of it, identifying where the Hand’s magic began and where the other Mages were supporting her. If they’d still had all twenty Mages, they might have been able to hold him. If he was uninjured, a mere eight supporting the Hand would never have been enough.

Looking up, he met Ndosi’s gaze and smiled sadly.

“I’m sorry, Charlotte,” he told quietly—then struck.

It was a tiny piece of magic, really. Something he’d taught himself long before to carve the first Rune of Power on his own flesh.

Charlotte Ndosi was a powerful Mage in her own right. Augmented with a Rune of Power, she ranked highly even among the Hands…but without the Rune, she would be no match for a Rune Wright with
five
.

His power tore through her Rune and
broke
it, ripping the silver polymer from her skin in an attack that sneaked through her defenses because it was almost gentle in its action…and vicious in its results.

Her power
collapsed
and the spell went with it. Damien was on his feet, fire flashing from his hands as the Mages began to realize what had happened.

All but one went down in moments, but the last deflected his strike and ran to Ndosi’s side. Damien thought the man was going to try and help the Hand, and hesitated for a precious moment.

Instead, the Mage shot her. Four shots echoed around the cavernous chamber and the woman’s small body lurched with each blow.

“Stop!” Damien bellowed, raising power to strike the man down—but the shooter simply threw him a salute and vanished in the crashing noise of vacuum filling.