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

Lori Armstrong, onetime member of Ardennes’ Planetary Parliament, tightened the cinch on her body armor vest. Whoever had designed the military-grade gear that had ended up on Ardennes hadn’t really sized the armor for a woman who had freely used sex appeal to try and overturn the assumption that the opposition couldn’t win seats on Ardennes.

She’d won her seat in the end, only to discover that Mage-Governor Michael Vaughn’s Prosperity Party had locked up the government in more ways than one. The six seats her Ardennes’ Freedom Party had managed to sneak in had been a tiny and ignored voice in a two hundred seat legislature.

Which was a story that ended here - with an ex-politician in body armor carrying a battle carbine strapped into the back of a stealth gunship smuggled in from offworld.

“How long?” she asked, pitching her voice to carry over the noise of the paired tilt-rotors carrying the little aircraft on its tree-skimming course around the planet.

“Thirty minutes, boss,” the pilot replied. “Couldn’t we have kicked the pot over somewhere closer to home?”

Lori shook her head wordlessly at the pilot. The woman, commander of one their two priceless squadrons of Legatus-built military aircraft, knew perfectly well that this hadn’t been planned.

She grabbed a communicator and checked the tell-tales on its encryption. Like the gunship, the high-tech encrypted communicators had been manufactured on Legatus and smuggled in via false manifests and hidden cargo drops.

“Hotel, come in,” she said into the device after punching in one of the twenty-six or so codes it could take.

“Please tell me you’re almost here,” the familiar voice of Anthony Hellet, codename Hotel, the head of the Karslberg Miners’ Union, another ex-member of the Freedom Party, answered. “The Scorpions have retreated to their barracks, but we’ve got
no
heavy weapons here, boss.”

“We’re thirty minutes out,” she told him. “What were you
thinking
?” she demanded. “We’re not ready, Hotel.”

“It was just a strike,” her old friend told her. “Shaft Six’s air circulators were down, and the mine boss was ordering people in with just respirators. The crew refused.

“Then the Scorpions rolled in, and I couldn’t have stopped my people from interfering if I’d
wanted
to,” he finished bluntly.

The Scorpions - the Ardennes Special Security Service - were
technically
an elite paramilitary police force. In practice, Mage-Governor Vaughn used them as his personal bullies and leg-breakers across the planet.

“When the dust settled, an entire company of the thugs were dead, and Karlsberg was rising,” Anthony finished. “Between our boys and the locals, they probably lost two
more
companies before they realized they’d lost the city,” he said with a cold satisfaction. “But that’s still two companies - four
hundred
Scorpions - in the barracks. We’re trying to hack their heavy weapon auth codes, but no luck so far.”

Lori nodded slowly. Scorpion small arms were much the same as the imported gear many of her own people used - to the point where the cartridges were identical Protectorate-standard rounds. Scorpion
heavy
arms, however, were locked down with authorization codes and ident-locks to prevent them falling into the hands of people who might use them to take out armored personnel carriers and reinforced barracks.

“Keep them pinned down,” she ordered. “A few rockets from the gunships should clear them out.”

“Then Karlsberg will be free,” Anthony promised. “Let Vaughn suck on
that
.”

A light started blinking on her comm.

“Hold on Hotel,” Lori told him, then switched. “Alpha,” she answered the channel. Many of her people knew
exactly
who she was, but she still insisted on solid com discipline.

“Boss, you have a problem,” the voice of one of her cell leaders told her. “It took a few hours to make it up the chain, but the Scorps have called in the Army.”

Lori’s heart skipped a beat, and she glanced around the gunship. Each of the six vessels was carrying five soldiers - thirty fully equipped light infantry. Combined with the gunships’ weapons and Anthony’s rebel miners that would be enough to take down the shattered remnants of a Scorpion security battalion.

“How many?” she asked.

“Looks like General Keller has managed to get the entire Ninth Armored rolling,” her agent said grimly. “That’s almost sixty tanks, boss. No idea how many infantry. They’re already out of the Montagne Noir base and heading your way through the pass.”

Lori pulled up a map on the computer on her wrist and considered it. Montagne Noir was on the other side of the Rocher d’Or mountain range from Karlsberg. They wouldn’t get there as fast as her gunships, but they’d roll over anything she could put into Karlsberg.

That said, there was only one route
through
the Rocher d’Or that would fit a tank battalion - and Governor Vaughn didn’t know about their imports.

“We’ll deal with it, Iota,” she told her cell leader. “Well done.”

She flipped back to Anthony’s channel.

“We’re going to be delayed,” she told him. “See if you can take out that barracks yourself - we’re going to have to deal with the Army.”

Anthony was silent for a long moment.

“Good luck, boss,” he said finally. “We’re both going to need it!”

Shutting down the channel, Lori leaned forward next to the pilot.

“You heard,” she said plainly. She could have shunted the communicator into her helmet for privacy, but she trusted everyone on the gunship with her life.

“There’s only one pass,” she replied. “Re-routing the squadron now.”

“Can you take them?” Lori asked, as quietly as she could with the rotors running around them.

The woman looked back at the nominal leader of the resistance and grinned.

“They’ll never even see us coming.”

#

By the time they were half a kilometer into the pass through the Rocher d’Or mountains, Lori was convinced her pilot - also her squadron commander - was insane.

Like the gunships themselves, Alissa Leclair was an import from the Legatus system. Unlike the gunships, she’d voluntarily emigrated from the Core World regarded as the first UnArcana World, looking for work.

Unsafe flying conditions and one accident too many had driven the helicopter pilot into the arms of Lori’s resistance.

Fortunately, Leclair had been trained as an emergency services pilot. She was capable of flying a nape-of-the-earth course that, combined with the stealth coating and ECM of the gunships, made them invisible to orbital platforms.

Those courses were utterly terrifying to her unfortunate passengers.

The pass through the mountains rapidly shrank to a river valley less than four hundred meters wide, with a wide road blasted into the cliffs along one side. Leclair led her six gunships screaming down the road - with ten meters of clearance from the cliffs - at two hundred kilometers per hour.

“There we go,” the Legatan said with a cold flatness to her voice. “Sensors show them ten kay ahead. All pilots - arm weapons systems.”

“They’ve
got
to know we’re coming,” Lori said aloud. “If we can see them, they can see us.”

“Stealth is relative, boss,” Leclair replied. “We’re stealthy as gunships go, but…” she shrugged. “You’re right. We won’t be able to do this again - but since they have no clue these babies are on the planet, we can do it this time.” The pilot patted the cockpit next to her affectionately.

“Sensors are showing Manticore Deuces,” another pilot reported. “Those are going to be a handful.”

“Could be worse,” Leclair told her crews. “I’m reading M2 tanks and Basilisk transports. No flak, no rockets, only onboard anti-air. Arm your cluster bombs and rockets, then follow my lead.”

It turned out Lori had only
thought
Leclair’s previous flying was terrifying. The moment she ordered the other gunships to follow her lead, the Legatan pilot took the stealth gunship into a sharp dive and blasted along the middle of the mountain highway.

Lori swallowed, hanging on to her shoulder straps with whitening fingers, and then stopped breathing outright as the aircraft tore around a corner, less than a meter from the rock face, into the face of the Ardennes Army Ninth Armored Battalion.

“
Mine
,” Leclair snarled and pulled the triggers on her joystick.

Four smart rockets blasted away from the gunship, each seeking its own target. Lori watched them with her breath held, and all of them slammed into their targets. The entire front platoon of the armored column erupted into flames, and Lori realized, at last, that they could actually
do
this.

While she was overcoming her crisis of confidence, Leclair had been continuing on her lethal way. The nose-mounted auto-cannon chewed its way through a trio of APCs, leaving behind piles of burning wreckage.

Finally, in a maneuver that almost made Lori lose her lunch, Leclair stopped the gunship in midair and blasted it a hundred meters straight up. From
there
, she fired two sets of heavy cluster munitions, and then twisted the gunship over the cliff face as the first, belated, return fire tried to chase her.

Behind her, the other five gunships of her squadron began firing their own rockets.

The armored column had never stood a chance.

#

Mage-Commodore Adrianna Cor, commander of the Royal Martian Navy’s Seventh Cruiser Squadron, was not a patient woman. She tolerated fools poorly and incompetents not at all.

She had no choice but to tolerate the man on her viewscreen, however, regardless of her opinion of Mage-Governor Michael Vaughn. He was the elected leader of the planet beneath her - and if his theoretically legitimate authority wasn’t enough, he also had evidence that would put Mage-Commodore Cor in jail for a long time - and he
also
had a
lot
of money.

“I thought your soldiers were supposed to be well-trained and well-equipped,” she said dryly. “Now, you’re telling me they got their heads handed to them by
miners
?”

“In the end,” Vaughn allowed. He was a bulky blond man, with muscles only beginning to fade into fat now after twenty years as a politician. “But it
started
when a company was ambushed by terrorists - terrorists with very clearly
offworld
training and weapons. The type the Protectorate is supposed to
stop
filtering through to my planet.”

Cor raised an eyebrow at the Governor. Customs and import control, as he very well knew, were the responsibility of local authorities - in this case, the fifteen Tau Ceti-built ‘export’ destroyers of the Ardennes System Defense Force.

“If the town is in open rebellion, as you say,” she told him, “then roll in your Army and be done with them. A few dozen rebels, however well trained or well equipped, can’t stand off a battalion or two of tanks. Even if the entire town has gone over, which I doubt.”

Instead of answering, Vaughn switched the camera to show an orbital shot from one of Ardennes’ many surveillance satellites. She noted absently that the resolution on the gear was fantastic even as she unconsciously leaned closer to the screen. The screen showed the wreckage of some kind of convoy - dozens of vehicles strewn across a mountain road in pieces. Sections of the road itself were on fire, and the survivors were focusing on saving people, not materiel.

“
This
was my Ninth Armored Battalion,” Vaughn said bluntly. “I don’t know where the fuckers
got
them, but they have attack aircraft of some kind - attack aircraft that my surveillance satellites do
not
pick up.”

Cor sighed.

“What do you need, Michael?”

“I need you to suppress the rebellion, Mage-Commodore,” he said bluntly. “Bring down fire on Karlsberg, and end this infection before it can spread.”

She glanced at a set of tell-tales, making sure that the conversation wasn’t being recorded. So far as her flagship’s computers were concerned, she wasn’t in communication with
anyone
.

“That’s one
hell
of a line you want me to cross,” Cor told him. “There’s what, fifty thousand people in Karlsberg?”

Even
she
felt a twinge of conscience over that, and she had no sympathy for mundane drones that didn’t know their place.

“Fifty thousand
rebels
,” Vaughn spat. “And if they have air support, I don’t know if we’ll be able to take the town back before the Hand arrives. Do
you
want to be the one explaining to one of Alexander’s ivory tower judges the realities of maintaining an economic boom in times like these?”

Cor snorted. What Mars’ representatives tended to think of the world, versus what the world actually
was
, tended to be very, very, separate in her experience. He was right though. When the Hand of Desmond Michael Alexander the Third arrived, things would get
very
bad if there was a significant open rebellion underway.