Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars (16 page)

Damien woke up out of a black fog for the second time in what he hoped was the same day. The feeling was familiar enough that he half-expected to find himself surrounded by a wrecked shuttle, which made no sense to him for several seconds.

Then his memory of the last few hours rushed back in, and his eyes snapped open and he tried to rise.

“Whoa there, sonny,” an unfamiliar voice told him. “Give a man a chance to see how well you’re ticking before you run off half-cocked!”

Blinking against the dim light, Damien slowly looked around. He had been stripped down to his underwear and lay on the bed in what looked like a hotel room. The bed was huge, but he’d been laid on one edge of it and a tall, heavyset, gray-haired man was standing over him.

The man wore a plain black suit and held a medical scanner.

“Who are you?” Damien coughed out. The last thing he remembered was a car pulling up behind him after he’d taken down one of the Scorpion gunships - a car with Amiri in it!

Glancing around again, he spotted the ex-bounty hunter. The tall, broad-shouldered woman stood just inside the door of the hotel room, her gaze flickering between whatever was outside the room and Damien himself.

“I am Doctor Adrian Staite,” the old man told him calmly. “Now, I understand you have had a difficult day. Please lie back down so I can finish examining you. It is important, young man.”

He met Amiri’s eyes. He hadn’t seen the woman in well over two years, but he knew she’d been working for Alaura. Presumably, she was the agent the Hand’s code had reached. Her timing, in that case, had been impeccable.

The ex-hunter nodded her head slightly. She, at least, thought the doctor could be trusted.

“Can someone brief me?” he asked as he lay back.

“Once I’m done, no earlier,” Staite said bluntly. “You’ll do none of us any good if that head wound is worse than it looks, will you?”

Sighing, Damien gestured for the doctor to continue. Staite proceeded to poke and prod, both with the oblong scanner he was holding and his hands and fingers. After several minutes of that, he flashed a light in Damien’s eyes that made the Envoy blink and recoil.

“Hrm,” he muttered aloud.

“I don’t think I’m dying, Doctor, so where am I at?” Damien demanded.

“You’re right, you’ll live,” Staite said dryly. “You’ll also be pleased to note that none of the abrasions or cuts you picked up have damaged the integrity of your runes - the polymer withstood the impact without damage.”

“It had better,” Damien muttered. The polymer was supposed to withstand anything an armored starship hull could withstand - it should take impacts
better
than his skin.

“You’d lost a lot of skin, and a good bit of blood despite your bandaging job,” the doctor continued. “I’ve sprayed down the worst injuries with plasti-skin and run a liter of blood into you while you were still asleep.”

He shrugged.

“Otherwise, you have a mild concussion,” he continued. “My recommendation is that you go back to sleep. I’ve a couple of medications that if you take and then sleep about eight hours, you’ll be back to a hundred percent.”

“Of course, if you let anything
else
smash you upside the head, it’ll be worse now,” he warned. “So, take the meds I’ll grab you, sleep till morning, and then be careful.”

Damien looked at the doctor levelly.

“I’ll try,” he promised.

“I’ve met your type, son,” Staite told him. “That’s the best I’m getting, isn’t it? I’ll grab those meds -
don’t
leave the bed.”

The doctor walked away from the side of the bed, but was swiftly replaced by Amiri.

“You heard all that,” Damien said.

“Yeah,” she replied. “Try not to die on me - we’ve still got a lot to do.”

“How bad?”

“Alaura’s dead,” Amiri said bluntly. Damien nodded - he’d been pretty sure of that. “Vaughn staged a fake ‘rebel’ attack on Government House. The entire delegation was wiped out. He’s also claiming sabotage took out the
Tides of Justice
.”

“No,” Damien said quietly. “That was Cor.”

“
Mage-Commodore
Cor?” Amiri demanded. She looked shocked. Apparently, neither she nor the rebels she’d made contact with had managed
that
connection yet.

“Cor took out Karlsberg,” Damien told her. “Harmon worked it out - it was a Navy orbital kinetic weapon. The Mage-Commodore has betrayed Mars.”

“That reduces our options a lot, Damien,” she said quietly. “I’d been writing her off anyway - clearly Vaughn had
something
over her - but I didn’t think she’d be actively against us.” She glanced back over her shoulder to be sure they were alone.

“I have escape plans in place, Montgomery,” she whispered. “I can get us both off-planet and en route back to Mars inside forty-eight hours.”

He shook his head, wincing against the pain.

“Not yet,” he whispered. “Not ruling it out, but not yet.” He glanced down at his undressed form. “Where is…?”

Staite returned as he was speaking, and he met Amiri’s eyes, hoping the woman could guess what he meant.

“Your Warrant is in the folio on the dresser over there,” Amiri told him, gesturing towards the dresser with her right hand. Her
left
hand, however, opened her jacket slightly, allowing him to see a handful of links of gold chain hanging over the edge of the inner pocket. She quickly scooped those back into the pocket, but he’d seen what he needed to.

She had the Hand, and had kept the rebels from knowing about it.

“So we’re on our own,” he finally said, considering what she’d said. “You have contacts?”

“One with the Wing, yes,” Amiri admitted. “He found us Doctor Staite, but the Wing is… busy.”

“Going to ground,” Damien concluded. It made sense. Anything else would be damned stupid right now.

“Everyone’s waiting to see which way Vaughn jumps now,” Amiri told him. “So what do we do?”

“Our young friend here takes these pills and sleeps,” Staite interrupted, gesturing for Damien to rise and passing him a glass of water and two small blue pills. “They’ll clear the bruising and get your head working again by morning.”

“Things are falling apart,” he continued quietly, “but the center will hold until you wake up, Mister Montgomery. You can’t save the world if you can’t stand.”

Damien took the pills and shook his head at the doctor.

“I hope you’re right,” he told Staite. “That things will hold together till morning.”

Amiri smiled and patted a long black object leaned against the wall next to the door. It took him a second to recognize the military battle laser - a squad support weapon, usually.

“I’ll guarantee you this, Montgomery,” she said with a small smile. “
You’ll
still be here come morning.”

The medications were already kicking in, and Damien returned the smile as he laid back down. Everything might be coming apart - but at least he had someone to watch his back.

#

Riordan returned in the morning, before Staite’s drugs had worn off. Amiri had cat-napped through the night, being willing to give the hotel’s security
some
credit, and was sitting in a chair she’d moved over in front of Montgomery’s door when the rebel returned, the battle laser across her lap like a pet cat.

“How is he?” the rebel asked.

“Sleeping,” Amiri told him pointedly. At this point, she was ranking ‘keep the Envoy alive’ high on her list of priorities. She liked Riordan, but there were limits.

He simply nodded and threw himself into the couch. His hair was mussed and his suit rumpled; he looked like he hadn’t slept at all.

“Hell of a night,” he said aloud. “We got everyone in High Ardennes buried three layers deep. Hopefully it will be enough.”

“Against what?” Amiri asked.

“Whole fucking
battalion
of Scorps, headed up by General Montoya’s favorite pet Mage sadist, is heading this way,” Riordan said grimly. “We’ve got eyes on them, don’t think they’re coming for us, but we don’t know who they
are
coming for.”

“I didn’t think the Guild
liked
sadists,” Amiri pointed out.

“Yeah, but the Testers get
real
snarky if they put too many obstacles in the way of Mages by Right.”

She winced.

The Royal Testers were, in general, a hugely necessary and positive part of the Protectorate’s structure. They traveled from world to world, school to school, testing every child of the Protectorate’s far-flung stars for the gift of magic. For those born to the families of Mages, with the privilege and history those clans inevitably gathered, it was almost a formality - Mages married Mages, so their children were almost always Mages.

For the rest of humanity, it was even more of a formality - Mages found in the general population, those who would become Mages by Right like Montgomery, were roughly one in a million. Since they didn’t have the family connections of Mages by Blood, the Testers stepped into a similar place in their lives.

And, if a Mage by Right was a sadist, it might well get swept under the rug in the Protectorate’s unending appetite for new Mages for everything from antimatter production to the Navy.

“Just the fact that Mage-Colonel Travere is in command makes me nervous,” Riordan admitted to her. “He brought a bunch of combat trained Mages with him, but we don’t
have
any Mages here in High Ardennes. If he’s coming for us, he hasn’t brought enough heavy weapons for the job - but he’s brought too many Mages for anything else we can think of.”

Something buzzed in Riordan’s jacket and he pulled out what Amiri recognized as a military-grade encrypted communicator. Like a lot of the gear she’d been seeing so far, it had been made on Legatus. If the rebellion’s equipment was being smuggled in from offworld, she would have expected more of it to be from different places - or mostly from Amber, known for not asking questions of its exports.

Riordan held the com to his ear, triggering a privacy field while he spoke into it. Halfway through the conversation, he blanched, his face turning pale and staying that way.

Finally, he lay it aside and looked back at Amiri. He looked even more tired than he had before.

“They bypassed High Ardennes,” he said quietly. “Nobody’s sure, but we think they’re headed for the Sunshine Resort.”

“Which is?”

He shook his head.

“I
know
who you work for, and I still forget you’re not from here,” he told her. “Sunshine is way up in the mountains, the best ski slope and hotel near High Ardennes. We… aren’t entirely sure why they’re headed there, but they’ve already cut off all communication from the resort.”

“Whatever’s going to happen out there, they don’t want anyone to see it.”

#

It was another twenty minutes, with no further news, before Montgomery woke up. Amiri heard him moving around and stepped back into the hotel room where the Envoy was slowly getting dressed.

She hadn’t found him a new suit, and his body armor had been
shredded
, but she’d at least dug up a pair of slacks and a dress shirt that fit him. As she entered, he was buttoning the shirt up, closing the collar overtop of the leather band wrapped around his neck and its gold medallion.

As soon as the door closed behind her, he turned and held out his hand wordlessly.

Amiri didn’t ask what he was after. She dropped the tiny and intimidating weight of the Hand into his palm. It sat there for a long, long moment. Then it buzzed slightly as it warmed against his skin and popped out its access port. Gently, he closed it back up and then hung it around his neck, under the shirt.

“It is mine,” he said quietly. “That’s what I spent the last three years training for, but I wasn’t ready yet. Alaura was supposed to teach me.”

“Not anymore,” Amiri told him.

“Not anymore,” he agreed.

“Have you thought about my suggestion?” she asked. “Honestly, just getting you out alive will bring Vaughn down and finish the mission.”

“I know,” he said quietly. “But what do you think will happen here if we run, Amiri?” he asked, gesturing around them. “Vaughn has blamed the death of a Hand on the rebels. He likely believes he can get away with anything in ‘the pursuit of Stealey’s killers’.”

Montgomery paused, looking away from Amiri and at the wall.

“If he succeeded in fooling the Hands, he would be right,” he admitted. “A Hand falls. Another rises, and they rise for vengeance as much as justice. With Cor working for Vaughn, too… we can’t leave, Amiri,” he concluded. “Whether or not I’m supposed to have this yet,” he touched the amulet under his shirt, “I
have
it. And I’m here. I have to do
something
.”

Amiri let disappointment run through her for a moment. Part of her wanted to knock out Montgomery and Riordan, package them up and ship them off-planet with her. The two
idiots
who’d fallen into her care were going to get her killed.