Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars (19 page)

“My old crew called me that a few times,” he replied innocently as she stepped closer to him and hooked her arm through his. “I never did understand why. Hold on.”

She didn’t even get a chance to ask why before the mountain disappeared, to be replaced by their hotel suite in High Ardennes.

The ex-bounty hunter, a hardened soldier, spacer, and spy… glared at Montgomery for all of ten seconds before she noisily threw up on him.

#

Lori met Riordan and his passengers in a parking garage at the edge of town. The big military truck barely fit into the first floor of the concrete structure, but it was at least out of sight from any watching satellites or Navy warships.

“Please tell me you have some plan for getting us out of here,” Riordan told her as he dropped out of the truck. “I… didn’t fully expect Montgomery to succeed, so I didn’t plan past getting here. I have places to
put
them,” he continued, “but they’ll track the truck here, and we can’t afford for them to track us away from here.”

“Maintenance tunnels,” Lori told him calmly. “I used to play in them as a child, and one of our people ‘borrowed’ the access codes from their servers after we set this as the rendezvous point.”

Jacob Pierre joined the pair, taking Lori’s hands in his own and bowing over them.

“
Mademoiselle
Armstrong,” he greeted her softly. “It appears I have the impetuous rebellion of yours that I have long berated to thank for my life.”

“You have Envoy Montgomery to thank,” she replied uncomfortably. “We… couldn’t risk acting with our own resources - we would have put all High Ardennes at risk.”

“Of course,” Pierre agreed. “I did not expect you to save us, Lori,” he admitted. “We… spent too long castigating you for having the courage to act. You were right, and I was wrong. Vaughn is too far gone to be convinced or swayed.”

“One of us had to stay,” Lori reminded him. “
Someone
had to try, and you had the patience for it, not me.”

“We need to get these people moving, Lori,” Riordan told her. “After the disaster Montgomery made of the resort and Travere’s battalion, I don’t think they followed us - but Montoya will be moving new troops into place as we speak,
and
asking for help from Cor.”

Lori nodded and gestured for the rescues spilling out of the truck to follow her.

“It won’t smell overly nice,” she told them over her shoulder, “but the maintenance tunnels are supposed to be secure. Any record that we used them will be wiped too, so the trail will end here. You’ll be safe.”

She opened the door and gestured for the refugees to go past her. One of her Freedom Wing soldiers was waiting on the other side, and began to gently guide the Green Party politicians and staffers into the underground network.

“I thought we were safe at Sunshine,” Pierre finally murmured from behind her. “I’ve spent years keeping us completely separate from your Wing. We’ve done
nothing
.”

“Except oppose Vaughn,” Lori told him. “That, it seems, is now enough. No resistance will be tolerated, all dissent will be crushed. He thinks he’s blamed us for the death of a Hand, Jacob, and that’s the fire he’ll burn us all in given half a chance.”

“But the Envoy is working with you,” Pierre objected. “That means… Mars knows what happened.”

“Montgomery knows what happened,” Riordan said quietly. “I don’t know what the man’s plan is, but he wants our help. So…”

“I asked him to rescue you,” the Freedom Wing’s leader told Pierre. “To prove both that we could trust him, and that he was, well, worth the risk.”

Jacob Pierre shivered at the thought.

“I saw him fight Travere,” the old politician admitted. “I don’t think anyone else did, but there was a gap in the shutters I could see through. He took on Travere and two of his Enforcers and killed them. A Marine Combat Mage shouldn’t have been able to do that.
Nobody
could have.”

“But he did,” Lori said grimly.

“He did,” Pierre confirmed. “And made it look easy. I don’t know what Montgomery is, Lori, but I don’t think he is just a Mage - or just an Envoy! He’s a dangerous ally, but…” he shrugged as the last of his people made their way into the tunnels.

“If you want to know if he’s worth it, he is,” he finished bluntly. “If nothing else, his word alone will hang Vaughn when the next Hand arrives to avenge Alaura - a mere Governor against an Envoy?”

“So what, we should get him on side and then sit on him?” Lori asked.

Pierre laughed, a sharp bark that seemed to surprise him as well as Lori.

“It would be wise,” he agreed. “But… I do not think ‘sitting on’ Montgomery is going to happen.” The old man glanced after his people, then back at Lori.

“I don’t expect I will see Montgomery again until all of this is settled,” he concluded aloud. “But you will, I am sure. Give him my thanks for my life, and the lives of my people.”

“I will,” Lori promised.

“Stay alive, my dear,” Pierre told her, then set off down the tunnels after his staff, leaving Lori and Riordan standing alone in the rapidly darkening parkade.

“How long until they find the truck?” she asked.

“I’m pretty sure it has a tracker,” Riordan admitted. “An hour, maybe two.”

She gestured for him to precede her into the tunnels, closing the door behind them and inputting the code that would both re-lock it and wipe any record it had ever been unlocked.

“Once you’re back to the hotel, tell Montgomery I’ll meet him,” she told him. “I’m not sure what we can do anymore, not with Vaughn controlling the skies, but he may see a path I don’t.”

#

“It’s confirmed. Travere didn’t survive the attack.”

Vaughn grunted at Montoya’s words, looking at the satellite footage of the wreckage that had been the Sunshine resort.

The avalanche had triggered an alert that had sent dozens of regular emergency personnel out to the location. While they’d placed themselves under Scorpion authority when more senior Special Security Service officers arrived, their presence had definitely made any attempt to bury what had happened impossible.

Not that they had a damn clue what had happened.

“Any luck finding footage of the attack?” he demanded.

“None,” Montoya replied sourly. “Travere had us rig the satellites so they weren’t overhead when he was there - a safety measure, just in case. So now…”

“Now we have no idea how he died,” Vaughn snapped, sweeping a glass of whiskey off the desk in the temporary office he’d commandeered in the command center. It hit the ground and shattered, and he stared at the amber liquid amidst the ice cubes and shattered glass.

Travere had been… not quite a friend, but a trusted subordinate, a Mage who understood the measures necessary to hold an entire planet together.

“Why did it take so long to identify Travere?”

“Because there was nothing
left
of him,” Montoya snapped, his voice harsher than he usually addressed his Governor. Vaughn let it pass - Travere
had
been Montoya’s friend.

“His body was burned to ashes,” the general continued after a long moment. “The section of the building he was in was half-wrecked. I saw the pictures. It looked like… it
was
the aftermath of a Mage fight.”

Vaughn’s gaze snapped to Montoya, meeting his most trusted subordinate’s gaze. Montoya was
not
a Mage - but he had, once, a very long time ago, been a Martian Marine. Unlike anyone else Vaughn knew, the Scorpion’s commander knew what the aftermath of two Mages going head to head looked like.

“There are
no
Mages in the Green Party,” he observed. “So this wasn’t a case of them breaking themselves out.”

“No,” Montoya agreed. “And, well… so far as we can tell, there was only one Mage. He or she left Travere and six Enforcers dead behind them.”

“One Mage did that.”

“One Mage,” Montoya confirmed. “A Marine Combat Mage
might
manage that, given time and preparation. Maybe.”

“The Freedom Wing doesn’t
have
any Enforcers or Combat Mages,” Vaughn objected. “There are no fucking Combat Mages on the
planet
, Montoya.”

“That we know of,” the Scorpion pointed out. “But… there’s one Mage we
don’t
know the abilities of.”

“Montgomery.”

“I did some research on our Envoy after he killed my gunship,” Montoya told him. “He has… a reputation. Do you remember the Blue Star Syndicate?”

“They’re gone now,” Vaughn pointed out. The Syndicate
had
been a criminal organization, with ties to everything from trafficking sex slaves to manufacturing and selling illegal weapons. Their leader had died in some conflict on the Fringe, and the Protectorate Navy had done their job for once and rolled up the remnants.

“Yes. Azure died, and that was all they wrote,” his general confirmed. “But did you know
how
Azure died?”

Vaughn wasn’t sure what Montoya was talking about and was about to snap at the general when it struck home.

“Montgomery?!”

“Azure was chasing a jump freighter called the
Blue Jay
that was rumored to have been upgraded with an amplifier,” Montoya told him. “The old man caught up with the
Jay
somewhere out in the Fringe - and didn’t come back. The
Jay
hasn’t been seen since either, but the crew
has
shown up.

“And the last Jump Mage of record for the
Blue Jay
was Damien Montgomery, who next showed up on Mars, being trained by the Mage-King himself.”

“You think our lost little Envoy killed one of the most powerful Mage criminals of the last twenty years?” Vaughn demanded.

“It looks… possible,” Montoya told him softly. “And if it’s true… I’m not sure our Envoy is lost, or little.

“And whatever Damien Montgomery is, I no longer think he’s harmless!”

#

Amiri had managed to clean herself up and change by the time Riordan finally returned to the hotel room. She’d even mostly managed to stop glaring at Damien for not warning her.

He’d apologized - profusely! He’d actually forgotten how bad being the carry-on in a personal teleport was, otherwise he’d have warned the Agent in advance. A ship jump didn’t have the same effect, as everyone
inside
the ship basically experienced it the same way.

Personal teleports were not as accommodating.

“I see I guessed right on just where you’d disappeared to,” Riordan observed as he entered, finding Damien and Amiri sitting in the suite’s living room. “You both okay?”

“Despite Montgomery attempting to scare the living daylights out of me, yeah,” Amiri told him, and Damien smiled to himself. The Secret Service Agent seemed to be handling getting buried alive better than he would have!

“And our rescuees?” Damien asked.

“Being hustled through tunnels and taxis to safe-houses across the town,” Riordan confirmed. “Some we’ll have on buses or in other vehicles heading down to the cities.”

“They’re safe?”

“As safe as we can make them,” Riordan told him. “That isn’t… perfect. With the Wing going into hiding itself…”

“We deal with the world we have, not the world we want,” Damien said quietly. “Have you spoken to Alpha?”

“I have,” the rebel admitted. “She wants to meet. But, bluntly, we
are
going into hiding. We now
know
Cor is working with Vaughn - and the Mage-Commodore owns the sky. Neither Alpha nor I are sure just what we can do for you.”

“It depends,” Damien replied. “I need to know your resources, your limitations - I need to know the strength of your will, Riordan. How far you’ll go - how hard you’ll fight. I can do nothing on my own,” he admitted, “but I can also provide the Wing a legitimacy no-one else on Ardennes can.”

“And you’re apparently no slouch in a fight on your own,” Amiri interjected. “Which is not, everyone should note, stopping me from coming with you to this meeting.” She held up a hand as Riordan started to speak. “It’s not his call,” she told the rebel, and Damien silently admitted that she was right. “Right now, keeping him alive is my job, which means whether or not he gets a bodyguard is my call, not his.”

“Set it up,” Damien told Riordan. “My schedule is open,” he continued dryly, gesturing around the hotel suite. “Whatever works for Alpha - but the sooner the better.”

“It’ll be tomorrow morning,” the rebel replied. “I suggest you both get some rest. I certainly intend to!”

#

It felt like Lori had just fallen asleep when the emergency alert on the encrypted communicator startled her awake. It took her a moment to realize where she was and what was going on - the hotel room was hardly a familiar place to wake up.

Then she finally finished waking up and recognized the emergency alert for what it was, and hit the ‘receive’ command.

“Alpha here,” she responded sharply.

“Alpha, it’s Kilo,” a flatly calm voice said over the channel. “We have a problem.”

The politician Lori had once been would never have recognized that tone. The rebel leader she’d become did, as it was a tone she’d heard far too many times after Karlsberg: the calm that came from the end of all hope.

“What’s happening?”

“The Scorpions hit one of our safe-houses in Allarain,” Kilo continued in that same dead voice. “They must have broken someone and fast. Five more are already gone, and I don’t know how the other three were missed.”

Lori exhaled sharply with a gut-punch sensation. When they’d gone to ground, the Freedom Wing’s safe-houses had got crowded. Six safe-houses down was easily thirty or more people arrested or dead.

“There’s no way they didn’t find out about the Argent Cavalier office,” Kilo continued. “I’m there now and I’ve set up the data purge, but we kept a lot of the files on paper.”

Argent Cavalier had been an ‘investment holding company’ on paper, dealing in the buying and selling of shares on Ardennes’ planetary stock exchange. In reality, it had been a money laundering service and general financial administration center for the Freedom Wing.

No matter how much you wanted to keep things silent and hidden, some records were necessary with money. The records in Argent Cavalier’s files and computers would, if nothing else, lead the Scorpions directly to the two air bases with their hidden squadrons of stealth gunships.

“Get out of there, Kilo,” Lori ordered. “Set a fire, set the delete, and
go
.”

“No can do,” Kilo replied in that same dead voice. “That was the plan. Hell, my backup was to have you send Sierra if things were looking dire.

“But I underestimated ‘dire’,” she continued unflinchingly. “There’s Scorpions in the building - APCs on the ground, a gunship on the roof. There’s no way out. It’s four in the morning, there’s no-one else in the building.”

Lori realized what was going on at last and swore aloud.

“Dammit, Kate, there has to be
something!
” Even as she spoke, though, her use of Kilo’s real name told the truth. Kate Guerin was trapped, and she was going to die.

“We both know the answer, Alpha,” Guerin said flatly. “Truth is, I never figured deleting and burning files would be enough. The office was rigged with charges months ago. Let the fuckers come.”

A crash echoed through the radio channel, followed by gunfire, then a moment of silence.

“
Reddition et deposer vos armes
!” a voice shouted.

“
Venez et prend les
!” Kate spat back, and more gunfire followed.

Lori knew what was coming, but she couldn’t bring herself to turn the com off. She owed her friend that.

“Hey asshole,” Kate finally shouted as the gunfire slowed again. Her voice was strained. She sounded exhausted and in pain - the Scorpions had clearly hit her. “
J’ai une secret
- you were fucked as soon as you walked through the door.”

Lori heard the beginnings of an explosion, and then the channel cut out.

#

“In our top news story this morning, we have mixed news out the city of Allarain this morning,” a news reporter blared behind Damien as he, Amiri and Riordan took a seat in the restaurant of one of High Ardennes’ many hotels. This seemed to be an even higher class than the one they were staying at, and the waiters had clearly been expecting them. They were seated in a booth tucked away into a corner so unobtrusive as to almost be a separate room.

The booth also had its own TV, playing the news story that was slowly attracting Damien’s attention away from the excellent coffee he’d been served.

“Despite a breakthrough by the Ardennes Special Security Force that allowed elite counter-terrorism teams to arrest dozens of the Freedom Wing rebels, the terrorists managed to plant and detonate a bomb in an office building in downtown Allarain. While no civilian casualties have been confirmed yet, at least twenty Security Service personnel were killed in a valiant attempt to disarm the bomb to protect Allarain.

“Investigations and raids continue this morning, as our brave security forces sweep up the remainder of the rebel network in…”

The screen cut out as two women slid into the booth across from them. One was a gangly brunette woman with short-cropped hair and soft brown eyes. The other was shorter, though still taller than Damien himself, with blonde hair and an attractive physique.

The blonde woman’s eyes said everything. They were a light blue, and might once have been warm and caring. Today, they were red from crying and the temperature of ice.

“Alpha,” Damien greeted her softly. “I appreciate you meeting with me. I know you have a lot going on and more on your mind.”

Carefully studying the woman, he recognized her from the briefing notes on Ardennes. Six years before, Lori Armstrong had challenged Mage-Governor’s Vaughn’s Prosperity Party in the planetary election. She’d succeeded, but the Freedom Party had dissolved before the next election - sheer frustration, from what Damien could tell, shattering any attempt at peaceful change.

From those ashes, the Freedom Wing had been born. He wasn’t surprised to see Armstrong at the center of it all. The other woman hadn’t been in any of his briefings - she was a stranger, but held herself like a soldier. A bodyguard, though likely no more
just
a bodyguard than Amiri was.

“As you saw on the news, we have not been as successful as we hoped,” Armstrong told him grimly. “Now we are in the process of moving anyone we believe may have been compromised by the Allarain raids.

“To be blunt, Envoy Montgomery, I am not sure how we can help you.”

“Right now, you are burying your people and your resources as deeply as you can, so that Alaura’s replacement won’t find you when they come looking for Alaura’s killer,” Damien said quietly. “If I can make contact with Mars that will no longer be necessary. With only Vaughn’s people to worry about, who you have more practice in avoiding, I hope to use your resources to short-circuit any attempt by Vaughn to do something stupid.”

“Going openly against an entire planetary government qualifies as ‘something stupid’ on
our
end,” the other woman interjected. “If our resources were sufficient for that, we’d be having a very different conversation.”

From the way Armstrong looked at the other woman, Damien added ‘military advisor’ to her classification. Armstrong might head the Freedom Wing, but this other woman seemed to know more about their military force. Interestingly, she also spoke with a clear Legatan accent.

“What would be necessary depends very much on what sort of ‘something stupid’ Vaughn attempts,” Damien admitted. “But the first step, before anything else, is that I need to get in contact with Mars. We all know if a Hand falls, another rises to replace them. My word and my evidence is sufficient to make sure that Hand will come for the right person when they come for Alaura’s killer.”

“Which is of value to us, but hardly infinite value, Envoy,” Armstrong replied. “I do not believe the Hands are stupid. I expect Vaughn’s folly to come apart at the seams once the new Hand arrives - especially so long as you’re alive to communicate with them.”

“Miss Alpha,” Damien said softly, “do you honestly believe that Mage-Commodore Cor will stand by while Mars destroys Vaughn?”

The rebel leader was silent, clearly thinking hard.

“I do not know why Cor has thrown in with the Governor,” he continued. “But I do know that she ordered the weapon dropped that destroyed Karlsberg. But the Hands, the
King
, do not know this. They will assume that they can call on Cor for military force in this system - and they will
not
bring a force capable of defeating Cor’s squadron.

“If no-one is warned, the next Hand to arrive will walk straight into a trap. It will end with Vaughn and Cor in open rebellion against Mars - and once he’s gone that far, how patient do you think he’ll be with your rebellion? What limits do you think he will put on his men then, with no outside eyes to fool?”

The little side room was silent for a full minute, and then second woman spoke quietly.

“We lost a lot of our firepower in Allarain,” she admitted. “What even Alpha doesn’t know yet,” she glanced sideways at Armstrong, “is that most of our pilots for our southern squadron were among those captured. We don’t have backups. We barely managed to train enough people to field our aircraft as-is.”

Damien nodded slowly, and the beginnings of a plan began to come together in his mind.

“You need those pilots,” he said aloud. “I need access to the Runic Transceiver Array in downtown Nouveau Versailles - a task for which a distraction would be helpful.”

“All the prisoners from Allarain are held in the Versailles Bastille, about fifteen kilometers outside the city,” Armstrong objected. “The place is a fortress - automated anti-aircraft guns, robot sentinels, tracking turrets.”

“All automatic?” Damien asked.

“What else would they be?” Armstrong demanded.

“If I can give you a way into the Versailles Bastille, can you get me into the RTA?”

Armstrong glanced at her companion, then back to Damien.

“I’d say there’s no way, but you managed to get the Greens out of Sunshine. Can you really open a path into the Bastille?”

The golden hand inside Damien’s jacket, the one containing override codes that would work on any computer in the Protectorate, suddenly felt very, very heavy.

“Yes,” he said simply.

Armstrong nodded sharply.

“Then I think we can get you to the Array.”

#