Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars (10 page)

“The Envoy is here to speak with Riley and Pierre,” Leblanc told the men. “Open it up.”

“Thank you, Major,” Damien said. “Now, once the door is open, my men will provide security until I’m done speaking with them. We will advise when I am done.”

“That’s not…” Leblanc trailed off on his own accord this time. “As you command, My Lord Envoy.”

“Thank you,” Damien told him quietly.

With a small, somewhat pained looking, nod, Leblanc opened the door and led his men back down the corridor.

“You have some kind of jammer for the bugs, Sergeant?” Damien asked quietly once Leblanc was far enough away.

“Of course,” Mitchell replied.

“Then let’s find out what Riley and Pierre have to say.”

#

With the asexualizing body armor off, Riley turned out to be a slender woman with dark, buzzed-short hair. Pierre, on the other hand, was a completely bald man barely an inch taller than Damien’s own five-foot-nothing.

When Damien entered their ‘suite’, Riley was settled in watching something on a display screen, and Pierre was pacing the length of the cell block in a bounding, nervous pace.

“Riley Beaumont and Pierre Winslow?” he asked softly, making sure they could both hear him. With Leblanc gone, and the necessity to maintain a facade gone with the Major, Damien allowed himself to relax. He did not need to intimidate these people.

“Yeah,” Riley replied, glancing up at him. “Well, it looks like a suit, walks like a suit and quacks like a suit, so I’m guessing you’re from Mars?”

Damien was pretty sure he
wasn’t
supposed to have heard the muffled chuckle from the Marines behind him, but he was also glad to see the pair still had spirit. Leaving her comment hanging for a moment, he pulled up a chair and gestured for Pierre to sit.

After a moment, the nervously pacing soldier did so, but continued to nervously fidget.

“I am Envoy Damien Montgomery,” he told them. The title felt pretentious as hell to him still, but the pair needed to know how deep the waters they were swimming in were. “The rest of your squad died protecting Hand Stealey - that will
not
be forgotten.”

“Vaughn will wave their bloody shirts all over the place, that’s for sure,” Riley said bluntly. “Every ounce of mileage he can get from Mars out of Avison’s body is profit to him, I’m sure.”

“Beaumont!” Pierre snapped, the soldier’s face worried.

“Before we continue,” Damien interrupted before the Scorpion could continue, “I should probably mention that that I am recording this conversation. And, thanks to the wonderfully complex toys of the Royal Martian Marine Corps, I can guarantee that nobody
else
is.”

Pierre’s fidgeting stopped. Riley’s lackadaisical, somewhat lazy, pose vanished into an instant sitting form of attention. Unlike the moment before, Damien had no problems believing the pair were real soldiers now.

“Playing the real game now are we?” Pierre asked. “You might get us in deep shit, even covering us like that you know.”

“You fought and your friends died to protect Hand Stealey,” Damien reminded them. “Olympus Mons does
not
forget its debts. You need protection? Money? A ticket offworld? Name it.”

The room was silent for ten seconds. Twenty.

“You’re serious,” Riley finally said into the quiet.

“I am the Voice of the Mage-King of Mars,” Damien Montgomery told them, the words falling like tombstones in the quiet underground cell. “My word binds Olympus Mons. And I
need
to know who tried to kill Alaura Stealey.”

Pierre sighed, leaning back in his chair.

“We don’t know anything,” he replied. He held up a hand when Damien was about to reply, and repeated himself. “We don’t
know
anything.

“But we can guess, and we can draw conclusions,” he continued. “Look, people don’t call us Scorpions because it’s a really cool badge. They call us Scorpions because we’re nasty, we’re sneaky, and we stab folk when they’re not looking.”

He gestured at Riley. “Beaumont here? She’s squeaky-clean, three months out of school and assigned to Avison’s squad. Me? Not so much,” he admitted, meeting Damien’s gaze. “Avison was like her. Ten months out of the Academy, idealistic as hell. I think Leblanc was trying to shield him from some of the harsher realities, but I
also
think it meant someone marked him as expendable.

“As someone who’d look good dying for the Hand,” he concluded bluntly. “The rest of us? Just collateral damage - like the fucking kids.

“I can’t say anything for sure - like I said, we don’t know shit,” Pierre repeated quietly. “But they didn’t throw us down here until
after
we’d been interviewed by Colonel Brockson.”

“Special Operations Directorate,” Damien said quietly. He left the words hanging in the air, but both Pierre and Riley nodded fiercely.

“Scary fucker,” Riley observed. “I swear he was trying to make sure we
couldn’t
identify anything - but hell, the only thing I can say for sure is that those were
our
guns.”

“Our guns?”

“The rocket launchers,” she said grimly. “I picked up the signature pattern on my scanners - Martian Ironworks Arms Shrike Five Anti-Armor rockets. Ardennes Army doesn’t have ‘em - they use the Seven, it’s got a rotary magazine. Only force on the planet with the Shrike Five is the Scorpions.”

“Soon as he was done interviewing us, Brockson said we were in protective custody and threw us down here,” Pierre told Damien with a shrug. “Don’t know if it was Riley mentioning the Shrikes, or just wanting to be sure we didn’t say anything to the wrong people, but they locked us up good.”

“You want out?” Damien asked.

“Hell yeah,” Riley snapped. “I’ll take that ticket offworld, too.
Yesterday
.”

Pierre took a second to think about it, but nodded slowly.

“Yeah, I’m with Beaumont,” he said quietly. “I hear Martian summers are ten months long. I’d like to find out.”

Damien stood and gestured for them to follow him.

“I still have business here,” he admitted, “but I’ll make sure you’re spaceport-bound first, I think. You’ve been more helpful than you suspect.”

#

On his way to Brockson’s office, Damien began to have an inkling of why the Mage-King selected his Hands with such care. Having been connected to the chip inside the golden amulet, his personal computer was now capable of locating Colonel Elijah Brockson’s personal computer in the military facility.

Personal computers included everything from birth certificates to bank account details and were among the most heavily encrypted civilian electronics in the Protectorate. Accessing one without permission was legally a form of assault, and government access to a PC required a warrant.

As a Hand, Alaura’s word counted as a legal warrant. To enable that, the Hand itself was loaded with the encryption keys to override the security on most PCs. Combining the Hand with Alaura’s orders, Damien effectively had a blank warrant to lay open many of the deepest secrets of those around him.

The three years of training and a planned year-long apprenticeship - all of which followed doing something spectacular enough to attract Desmond’s attention - seemed a frail shield against that much authority and power.

“You’ll want to lock his PC,” Mitchell told him quietly as they exited the stairs onto the seventh level of the office tower. No-one had challenged them since they’d left the dungeons. Damien had sent the two junior Marines - with an order signed in his Voice - to take Riley and Pierre to the spaceport, leaving only the Sergeant guarding him.

“I can
do
that?” Damien asked.

“Security lockdown,” Mitchell confirmed. “Theoretically, it’s a defense against theft, but that little gold toy of yours gives you the ability to lock it down remotely. If he’s busy, he might not even notice.”

Brockson technically had a job to be doing in Normandy, and Damien doubted he would be interfacing his personal computer with the general base network to help do it. That PC likely contained enough evidence to allow Damien to ask some
very
pointed questions of the Governor.

They paused outside the Special Operations Directorate Colonel’s office for a few minutes while Damien found the command he needed. Like all computer commands, it was perfectly innocuous looking. With a deep breath, Damien squared his shoulders and touched the key.

He could not afford weakness now and, with a firm nod to Sergeant Mitchell, Envoy Damien Montgomery, Voice of the Mage-King of Mars, entered the office.

#

Colonel Brockson clearly hadn’t expected to be interrupted. He looked up from the desk screen he was working on in annoyance, glaring at the intruders into the plain, completely undecorated, office he’d apparently inherited.

“Who the fuck are you?” he snapped. “This is a private office.”

“Colonel Elijah Brockson?” Damien said.

“What?” he demanded.

“You are Colonel Elijah Brockson, Ardennes Special Security Service? Currently assigned as Logistics Coordinator, Nouveaux Normandy Province?”

“I am. Now get out of my office before I call security,” Brockson snapped.

“They wouldn’t obey your orders over mine, Colonel,” Damien told him. He wasn’t, he had to admit internally, entirely certain on that point. Legal authority didn’t always translate into actual power. “I am Envoy Damien Montgomery. I’m investigating the assassination attempt on Hand Stealey, and I have some questions.”

Brockson stared at Damien in shock for a moment, almost immediately absorbed in a sharp laugh.

“I guess I can’t stop you if you’re really an Envoy, kid,” he replied. “Don’t know what you think
I
know about it!”

Damien smiled thinly.

“I have to admit,” he said genially, “I found it interesting that you left Nouveaux Versailles, what, ninety minutes after the Hand informed the Governor’s people she was coming here? Now, if that had been a previously booked flight, I might have understood it, but you had to have a military flight held for you and your cargo.”

“I take it you’ve never been military?” Brockson told him. “Hurry up and wait - or in this case, wait for the cargo, then hurry up.”

“Indeed,” Damien allowed. “What happened to your cargo, though, Colonel? You loaded eight crates - cargo labeled as explosive, but locked under a Special Operations Directorate seal - onto that transport plane. No such crates have been checked in at either base in this city.”

This time, Brockson was
definitely
caught off-guard. He took a moment to answer, and spoke slowly when he did.

“I’m afraid you must be mistaken, Envoy,” he told Damien. “I don’t know what the Special Operations Directorate is, and I checked my cargo in when I arrived - but given that it was mostly paper notebooks and new data chips, I doubt it stood out to whatever search you did.”

“That’s funny,” Damien told him softly. “Your file has you assigned as the commanding officer of the Special Operations Directorate, so I’m
very
sure you know exactly what it is. Would you care to elaborate?”

“I’m sorry, I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” Brockson said finally. “For that matter, accessing my file is a violation of my rights. I will have to raise this with the JAG.”

“Colonel, I speak for the Mage-King of Mars,” Damien reminded him. “If you’ve lost track, he is your ultimate boss. I have full authority to access your file. Full authority to override the Governor’s seal on said file.

“I
know
you head the SOD,” he continued. “I even have a damned good idea just what you’ve been up to. But I still have one question, Colonel?”

“Entertaining as this has been,” Brockson snapped, “I think the joke has worn thin. I don’t know who you actually are, but I’m pretty sure the Mage-King’s Envoys have better things to be doing with their time than this!”

“Did the poor bastards you set up know who you work for?” Damien asked softly. “Or did they think you were another rebel like them?”

“You have no proof of these insane allegations,” Brockson told him. “I’m calling security.” He went for his personal computer, only for it to refuse to respond.

“I suspect your personal computer contains more than sufficient proof,” the Envoy said quietly. “I secured it before we entered - to prevent you doing anything stupid.

“Sergeant Mitchell - arrest Mister Brockson, please.”

Despite the entire conversation, Brockson was frozen in place for a moment by sheer shock. Then he made a dive for the door. His palm caught Mitchell’s grasping arm, deflecting the Marine Sergeant into the wall.

The Scorpion made it all the way to the door before Damien stripped the glove from his right hand. As Brockson tried to dodge out of the office, he ran into a wall of force that bounced him back to the floor.

He sprang back to his feet, then froze in place as Damien wrapped him in bonds of pure force with a gesture.

“We’ll want his PC too, Sergeant,” Damien ordered blandly. “I’ll be intrigued to see what answers Mister Brockson gives us - one way or another.”

#