Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars (7 page)

“I can’t reach anyone,” Avison told her as he rejoined them, panting and looking shaky. The young officer’s gaze kept slipping out to the street, to the wrecked APCs and the bodies of his men. “I’m being jammed.”

“It won’t matter,” Alaura told him grimly. “As soon as my PC’s transmitter went off the air, Mage-Commander Harmon got an alert. If Governor Vaughn does not act,
he
will.”

Avison started to object to her assumption that Vaughn wouldn’t act, but before the first words were out he interrupted himself.

“Look out!” he snapped and threw himself forward. He pushed Alaura out of the way as three black-clad men in face masks emerged from the back of the store and opened fire.

The Scorpion officer succeeded at getting Alaura out of the line of fire - and himself into it. Bullets punched clean through his body armor and threw him to the ground at the Hand’s feet. He met her gaze for a seemingly eternal moment, then slumped to the cheap tile.

Alaura ran out of patience. There was always a danger of collateral damage when Hands acted - but it seemed that this building was already empty.

Fire flared along her skin, searing away the skintight black gloves she wore. The silver runes inlaid into her palms and right forearms flashed with warmth as she channeled energy. The fire gathered on her for a moment, and then she
flung
it out.

The three men in the store barely had time to realize just
what
they’d cornered before they died. Bolts of fire hammered into their skulls, incinerating their brains in a moment.

Rising from the wreckage of the store, Alaura gestured for her Marines and the two surviving Scorpions to stay down. There was no-one else in the store, but a second trio of black-clad men emerged from the building across the street.

They saw her first and were started to raise their weapons when she flung her hand out towards them. Lightning crackled from her outstretched fingers, her magic ripping open vacuum channels to deliver the overwhelming electrical charge to her targets.

One managed to scream. Just one.

She walked out into the street, watching for the original snipers and rocket launchers. A single shot rang through the air as one of the snipers panicked and revealed his location, the heavy high velocity bullet missing her by inches.

Her eyes cold, Alaura filled the room the shot had come from with fire. The rockets stored there ignited, the explosion ripping a massive crater in the side of the building. A twinge of fear ran through her, and she hoped that the building had truly been evacuated, and that there had been no-one simply hiding from the thugs upstairs.

“Ma’am!” a voice shouted, and she turned at the warning from the Scorpions carefully following her out. A second rocket launcher had been brought up to the window - but she found it as it fired.

The rocket traveled less than a meter before hitting a wall of force in midair and exploding. Fire flayed the exterior facing of the building, and then Alaura ripped away the wall of the apartment with a gesture.

Two men were standing there, looking outwards in shock as their cover disappeared. Alaura pulled their feet from beneath them with her magic, bringing them down to the street with a gentleness that had nothing to do with mercy.

“Tell me who sent you,” she demanded, standing over them. One of them was panicking, hyperventilating as he stared up at the bogey man of all who opposed the Protectorate.

The other spat in her face.

“
Enculez-vous, porc
,” he snarled. Before she could respond, he produced a small pistol from inside his clothes - but rather than firing at
Alaura
, he shot his friend in the head. Alaura ripped the gun from his hand and flung it away.

He smiled coldly.

“The boy lacked conviction,
putain
,” he told her. “
I
do not.”

The assassin bit down on something in his mouth, then spasmed, his head lurching back as the poison hit his system.

He collapsed next to his friend in the ruined street, leaving Alaura alone with her dead.

“Shit.”

#

Mage-Governor Michael Vaughn waited for the earnest Ardennes’ Planetary Army Colonel briefing him on the Nouveaux Normandy incident to leave, the door to his richly decorated office clicking quietly shut behind the woman, before allowing himself a massive grin.

It couldn’t have gone better if he’d choreographed every second of the encounter himself! The men on the ground had honestly believed they were part of a rebel organization, so he knew they would have said the right things for the moments Alaura had them captured.

And Avison! He suspected General Montoya had selected the overly earnest young man himself. Officers like Avison concerned Montoya, Vaughn knew, as men who hid their vices that well were difficult to control or predict. Nonetheless, the apparently squeaky-clean officer had given the
exactly
right impression of the Ardennes Special Security Service - and then died saving the Hand’s life!

With all of the assassins dead, there was no way Stealey could link the attack back to Vaughn. She
knew
, now, how dangerous his rebels were. It shouldn’t take much to swing her completely on side for a forceful, permanent, solution - one with all of the resources of the Protectorate behind her.

He smoothed his face to an appropriate expression of concern as his secretary paged him. He brought her image up and regarded the young woman - as beautiful as only the finest surgeons could make her, and an extremely pleasant armful in bed - calmly.

“What is it, Rita?”

“General Montoya is here to see you, sir.”

“Send him in, Rita. With everything going on, this is important,” he instructed.

While he waited for Montoya, Vaughn crossed to a hutch on the wall of his office and pulled out two crystal glasses and a decanter of whiskey. The whiskey was from Scotland on Earth and cost easily several months of the fixed wage a member of the Worker Placement Program received.

The crystal was from a set made in England in the early Twentieth Century. The decanter and six glasses had cost as much as some of the
apartment buildings
Vaughn had seen constructed for those same workers.

“Get in here,” he ordered when Montoya opened the door. The small man looked worried, but then, Montoya always looked worried. “Have a drink!”

He forced the glass of whiskey into the General’s hand, then clinked glasses with him.

“
Sante
!” he toasted, then took a swallow of the whiskey.

“It’s still early to celebrate, Governor,” Montoya replied, but only
after
drinking.

“We’re not done yet, no,” Vaughn agreed. “But the escapade your men pulled today? And poor, poor, Lieutenant Avison’s heroic death? I think we are well on our way to opening Miss Stealey’s eyes.”

“Do
not
underestimate the Hand, Michael,” Montoya said very quietly. His use of Vaughn’s first name stopped the Governor in his tracks - while Vaughn regarded the man as a friend and had tried several times to insist he use his first name, the General almost never did.

“This isn’t the first time someone’s tried to kill her, nor even the closest anyone has come to succeeding,” Montoya continued. He took a sip of the whiskey, shaking his head. “Hell, in one incident I’ve managed to acquire details of, Alaura Stealey was the direct target of a
regimental assault
. An assault that left three hundred men protecting her dead - along with
every single attacker
.”

“We were counting on the sheer destructive power of an enraged Hand,” Vaughn pointed out. “The weapons and intelligence you provided may have convinced our tame rebels they had a chance, but
we
knew better.”

“Yet you still underestimate her,” Montoya replied. “She does not trust you - and she has very capable people.”

Before Vaughn could ask what the other man meant, Montoya slid a chip into the reader on the Governor’s desk and triggered it. A hologram of Ardennes sprung into existence over the desk, and a highlighted flight path appeared on it.

“That left her destroyer,” Vaughn quickly realized. “Why wasn’t I advised of this?”

“It’s a Navy assault shuttle,” Montoya explained. “With twenty Marines aboard, launched the
minute
that the jammers engaged.

“You didn’t hear about it because they didn’t file a flight path or even tell us they were coming. They launched without permission, using full stealth systems. My people learned they were coming when the fuckers landed an assault shuttle in the middle of Nouveaux Normandy.”

“Dammit,” Vaughn exhaled.

“It’s worse. We backtracked their course through the surveillance satellites and some help from our friend Cor. They flew
directly
over Karlsberg.”

“The storm rolled in already,” the Governor objected. “They can’t have seen much.”

“It depends on what sensors they installed on the bird,” Montoya said grimly. “It will take them some time, but if they get any useful data, it could invalidate our whole video footage.”

“We have to take the risk,” Vaughn told him after a moment’s consideration. “The storm will break up the impact craters, clear away any evidence. It’s nice when this planet’s weather co-operates.”

Montoya shook his head.

“You’re right, boss, in that this went about as well as it could,” he concluded. “But we
need
to remember that Stealey doesn’t trust us as far as she could throw us. Anything we hand her, anything we set up, has to be
iron
tight.”

Vaughn finished his whiskey in one gulp, staring at the globe of his planet. He was going to play this bitch like a fiddle, one way or another. But Montoya was right, too. He had to be careful.

“Your bag-man with the rebels,” he said quietly. “Keep him in Normandy. Assign him some dipshit administrative command, something to keep him out of Stealey’s sight. Make sure anything about your Special Operations Directorate is locked down, too. My seal.”

Montoya nodded wordlessly, finishing his own whiskey.

“We need to keep her off balance, guessing,” Vaughn continued. “When the dust settles, I don’t need her to trust me or even
like
me - I just need her to do what I want.”

#

“My understanding,” Lori Armstrong said icily into the conference call connecting her to the other leaders of the Freedom Wing, “was that we were leaving Normandy alone to see if Governor Fok lived up to his potential.”

“For that matter,” the ex-leader of the Freedom Party and now rebel leader continued, “I recall agreeing to suspend operations
entirely
after Karlsberg, until we came up with a better strategy.”

“So
who the fuck attacked the Hand
?” she snarled.

The line, linked to all twenty of her top cell leaders, was silent for a long moment.

Then someone sighed, and the smooth, well-aged voice of Agent Papa spoke.

“None of us did, Alpha,” he said softly. “I’ve checked in with every cell leader in Normandy, and they’ve checked down. We’ve accounted for all of our people - and the Hand left a stack of bodies of the people who came after her.”

“And innocents,” Lori reminded them all grimly. Twenty-three people - including three
children
- had died when the attackers’ rockets had exploded.

“Which is why
we
didn’t go after the Hand,” Papa replied bluntly. “Their reputation is pretty clear - anyone who attacks them dies. And if you kill one…” she could see the older man’s shrug in her mind. “If a Hand falls, another rises. She’d be replaced, and her replacement would come in with a vengeance.

“And let’s be honest - with Vaughn prepared to flatten towns, the Hand may be our best chance at really stopping him.”

A number of the other cell leaders grumbled at that, though no-one said anything specific. Most of Lori’s people wouldn’t trust the Protectorate now - and she didn’t blame them. But if her people hadn’t taken a stab at the Hand…

“Do we have another movement forming?” she asked. “One we don’t know about?”

“
Non
,” a soft voice replied. “
Dupe-moi une fois, honte a toi. Dupe-moi deux fois, honte a moi
. It wasn’t rebels the
last
time someone blew up a building, was it?”

“November has a point,” Papa agreed. “Not just Karlsberg, but that spate of attacks two months ago in Normandy - those weren’t us.”

“We know who those were, in the end,” November confirmed, her voice heavily accented. “One of my girls pulled flight records. Colonel Brockson arrived in Nouveaux Normandy the evening before Hand Stealey.”

“Are you sure?” Lori demanded. Colonel Brockson had been the mastermind behind a series of bloody ‘terrorist’ attacks in Normandy after they’d pulled in their own horns.

“He’s been given new resources, ordered to expand his dirty tricks team into a whole battalion,” Iota, her main agent in the government’s military, told them. “They call it the Special Operations Directorate, and it makes the rest of the Scorpions look like cuddly kittens.”

“Damn,” Lori whispered. “How widespread are they?”

“I’m not certain,” Iota admitted. “I suspect he’s been assembling cells of people who
think
they’re rebels across the planet. As November said, though, he was in Normandy. And he’s been ordered
not
to return to Nouveaux Versailles.”

“If there was a goddamn red and black uniformed bastard I’d like to have a long chat with, that’s the one,” Papa said softly. “Oath of pacifism be
damned
.”

“Is there any way we can get that information to the Hand?” Lori asked.

Her people were silent for a long moment, then November spoke again.

“
Magnifique
,” she whispered softly. “I have an idea.”

#

“News reports are rolling in from Nouveaux Normandy of massive civilian casualties after a failed attempt by the so-called ‘Freedom Wing’ to assassinate Alaura Stealey, Hand of the Mage-King of Mars.

“Current estimates are that in excess of forty people are dead, including ten members of the Ardennes Special Security Service who were escorting the Hand.

“Hand Stealey is on Ardennes on the direct orders of the Mage-King, seeking the murderers behind the destruction of the city Karlsberg. It seems the ‘Freedom Wing’ has no interest in…”

The video news in the corner of the staff break room of the Versailles Arms cut off, and Amiri quickly looked over to see who had interrupted her viewing. Riordan’s name had got her a relatively decent room in the Arms - a mid-range hotel near the spaceport - and a tab that seemed unlimited so long as she didn’t abuse it.

In exchange, she’d been quietly helping out around the hotel - mostly as muscle in the case of matters the hotel owners wanted dealt with before the police were involved. She kept out of sight otherwise, either in her room or down here in the staff break room when she needed company.

She hadn’t actually
heard
anything from Riordan since she’d arrived here, however, so she was surprised to see the Freedom Wing demagogue holding the remote behind her.

“We didn’t do it,” he said bluntly.

Amiri eyed him carefully. If Riordan knew who she
actually
was, she doubted he would try to use her as a conduit to Stealey. The rebels would almost certainly see her as a threat, not an opportunity.

“I’m not exactly inclined to believe government news, if that’s what you mean,” she said slowly.

He sighed.

“Sorry, Jewel,” he said quietly. “I just know that’s going to be an argument I’ll need to have a
lot
over the next few days. I’m not on the same page as the folks who think Mars is going to swoop in and save the day, but taking potshots at Hands is a bad way to promote our cause.”

“The bar’s empty,” he continued. “Grab you a drink?”

So this was a social call - from a man with few friends he could trust. Amiri could play that game.

“Sure.”

The bar was empty, though not closed as she’d half-expected. Riordan gestured to the bartender as they walked in and then took a dark-paneled booth near a back corner. The bartender showed up a moment later with two whiskeys on the rocks.

“Why are you so convinced Mars isn’t going to help?” she asked after taking a sip of the liquor. “Everywhere else I’ve been, the Protectorate really does try to, well, protect people.”

“Mars never
has
helped here,” Riordan said bitterly. “Twenty
years
, that’s how long Vaughn has been in power. He buys the interstellars, accepts bribes from the local corporations - he grows fat, the corporations grow rich, and the rest of Ardennes gets turned to slaves.

“And what has Mars done? They built their fuelling station here - there’s an entire
squadron
of cruisers in this system, their crews coming through on shore leave.