Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) (20 page)

Duke of Magnificence
limped into Mars orbit in a vastly different state than anyone on the surface of humanity’s capital world had expected. One of the battleships permanently placed in Mars orbit shepherded them in,
Reminder of Liberation
hovering over her smaller sister like any anxious sibling would.

Aboard her, with a heavy tread, Damien led his small party toward the shuttle bay. Once again, the ship had suffered carrying out his mission. It seemed he was doomed to lead the men and women of the Royal Martian Navy into battle.

Amiri and Christoffsen followed behind, a trio of Secret Service agents bringing up the rear to provide additional security even there. They’d all picked up something of his mood, staying silent as they made the trek from Damien’s office—undamaged, despite everything—through the damaged battlecruiser to the shuttle waiting to return him to Mars.

He stepped into the bay, one of the largest open spaces aboard the massive battlecruiser, and stopped dead as he realized it was
full
of people. Front and center, a double file of Marines headed by Mage-Captain Denis Romanov, but behind them were…dozens,
hundreds
of the ship’s crew.

“ATTEN-HUT!” Mage-Captain Kole Jakab’s voice snapped out, and
every
off-duty
member of
Duke of Magnificence
’s crew snapped to attention and saluted as one.

Blinking back tears and surprise, Damien returned the salute as carefully as he could, facing the spacers who’d fought for him
again
.

“My Lord Montgomery,” Jakab said loudly, stepping forward in front of his crew and offering his hand. “It may have taken longer than we’d have liked, but we bought you home.”

“I seem to have got your ship a little beaten up again, Captain,” Damien admitted, taking the proffered hand. “We may have faced a few more trials than any of us expected along the way.”

“We did,” the Captain confirmed. “But we faced them together. And we’ve a few scratches to fix up, my lord, but once that’s done,
Duke of Magnificence
and her crew will be ready to serve however you ask of us.

“We’d all be dead twice over without you,” he said. “This crew will not forget, Lord Montgomery. Call, and we will answer. Command, and we will obey. For as long you’ll have us, this is
your
ship and
your
crew.”

Now he truly was blinking back tears.

“I could ask for no finer crew, no finer ship to have at my back,” Damien told them, speaking to the crew more than Jakab. “I have asked more of you than I would have asked of anyone given a choice, and you have risen to that call again and again.

“Duty takes me home to Mars, but I know duty will carry me away from Mars as well. And when duty calls for me to leave this world behind, I would do so on no other ship, with no other crew.”

“We made it this far together, sir,” Jakab told him. “Mage-Captain Romanov will join you on the surface once we’ve had a chance to sort out quarters for his company.”

“Thank you,” Damien said softly, quietly enough that none of the crew could hear him.

“Don’t thank me,” the Captain replied. “It was their
idea. My crew knows
their
Hand, after all.”

#

It was summer in the northern hemisphere of Mars around Olympus Mons, and bright green grass and trees crawled their way up the slopes of the immense mountain, winding through the wide thoroughfares and planned boulevards of Olympus City.

The City stopped below the snow line, not technically part of “the Mountain” people spoke of when they talked of the Martian government. The terraforming of Mars, a process accelerated by the first Mage-King and augmented to include, among other things, adjusting Mars’s rotation to the same twenty-four-hour day as Earth, was now hundreds of years old. The complex Damien was headed to, however, predated that terraforming.

First carved into Olympus Mons to house the army the Eugenicists had later used to
conquer
Mars, the network of tunnels and caves now referred to with the same name as the mountain had then housed the monstrous forced breeding experiments of the Olympus Project, birthing humanity’s Mages.

When DMA-651, the man who would later become Desmond Michael Alexander, had realized what the runes in the complex did, he had turned on his creators and destroyed them. Using the power of the Olympus Mons Amplifier, he had forced peace in the Solar System and made himself ruler of all humanity.

But the use of the Amplifier meant he had to live in the Olympus Mons tunnels—and the access to those tunnels turned out to be above the snow line on terraformed Mars.

Even as Damien looked down over the summer green of Olympus City, wind and snow buffeted the shuttle. His pilot was one of the veterans from Jakab’s crew, however, and she handily guided the spacecraft through the turbulence until the air suddenly, literally magically, smoothed out as they approached the pad they’d been directed to.

The Hand breathed deeply, making sure his suit was perfectly aligned, his fist-like symbol of office was showing on his chest and his Mage medallion was secure on his throat. He’d left Mars a year before, officially an Envoy, informally an apprentice Hand.

He’d only been back once since: a single three-day visit for Alaura Stealey’s funeral that had been more a blur than anything else.

The shuttle settled down onto the pad with a flash of superheated steam as a drift of snow evaporated under the thrusters. From repeated experience, Damien knew that the reinforced concrete of the pad would be skin-meltingly hot. That heat was one of the reasons Marine exosuits
existed
, though he hadn’t known any of them to complain about the extra armor the rest of the time.

“Looks like you have a welcoming party, my lord,” the pilot told him, and he looked at the external screens.

He’d half-expected a swarm of government officials, security, etcetera. Instead, there was a quiet cordon of Secret Service agents around the pad, but only three people waited by the tunnel into the Mountain.

Damien recognized all three of them in an instant, though the youngest had shot up at least fifteen centimeters since he last saw her.

“I guess I’d better hurry,” he told the pilot past the lump in his throat.

It wouldn’t do, after all, to keep the entire Martian Royal Family waiting.

#

Shielding yourself from the heat of a landing pad was within the capacity of many normal Mages, though not all. There were tricks you could teach that would allow most Mages to do it, but even then, it was generally wiser to simply wait out the temperature. Most landing pads on major worlds had underground cooling tubes that would whisk away the heat in a few minutes.

For a Hand with even a single Rune of Power, it was a relatively small drain on power, often used to help awe whatever local powers they were going to have to work with.

Today, Damien simply used it to get across the pad to meet his King faster. He reached the cleared ground beyond the pad, releasing his power as it was finally cool enough to walk without it, and saluted Desmond Michael Alexander the Third crisply.

Any attempt at formality or ceremony promptly disintegrated two seconds later when the gawky form of the Mage-King’s younger child slammed into him. Kiera Michelle Alexander, Princess of Mars, was fourteen years old and lankily carved from skin and bone at over a hundred and sixty centimeters—at this point,
taller
than Damien by a large margin.

She hugged with all of the grace and energy of an eager colt, and he returned the hug with a sheepish grin at the King.

Desmond Michael Alexander the Third, Mage-King of Mars and Protector of Man, simply laughed. He was a tall man with hair silvered with age, no longer the platinum blond of his two children. Like his children, he was carved from skin and bone, but what was gawky and endearing in the two teenagers was stern and foreboding to those who didn’t know the man.

Though well into a vigorous second century, there were few lines on his face and he moved with grace and energy.

“I am the ruler of a hundred worlds, master of a Navy without peer in history, and wield magics unknowable by most of mankind,” Desmond said calmly, “but I am not fool enough to believe I rule my children.”

Kiera stepped back slightly, examining Damien’s face.

“You look tired,” she told him. Someday, she’d learn her father’s social grace, but she remained as blunt as she had been when he left. “I saw some of the reports.” She glanced back at her father. “You should have come home sooner.”

“He’s been busy, Kie,” Desmond Alexander the
Fourth
, most commonly known as “Des” still, told his little sister as he shook Damien’s hand. The eighteen-year-old Crown Prince of Mars had finally matched his father’s towering height while Damien had been away, easily thirty-five centimeters above Damien’s own diminutive size, though he managed to be even
skinnier
than his father with it. “Plus, I seem to recall you trying to scare him away.”

The younger Alexander sibling flushed beet-red and looked away from Damien.

“I was
thirteen
,” she pointed out from the lofty maturity of fourteen. “And…you look
awful
, Damien. Are you all right?”

“It’s been a rough few weeks,” he admitted, meeting the Mage-King’s gaze. “I’m not sure I can talk about it yet, either. You’ll have to ask your father.”

“Fine,” Kiera Alexander responded with an exaggerated sigh. “Or I can flutter my eyelashes at Chancellor Gregory and talk up ‘wanting to be informed about the state of the nation’.” Her pious tone was almost enough to convince
Damien,
and he knew the Princess’s foibles.

So did Chancellor Malcolm Gregory, the man who helped run the day-to-day of the Protectorate Government. It would
work
, but only because the second-in-line to the Throne in the Mountain
did
need to be informed about the state of the nation, not because he’d been fooled.

“Come, Kiera, Des,” the King said quietly. “I promised you could meet Damien at the pad, but he and I have work to discuss. He
will
be joining us for dinner, so you can bend his ear then. There will be a reception afterwards,” he warned Damien, “but dinner will be quiet.”

Damien recognized the order in the stressed word and nodded his obedience.

“So long as we get that talk,” he murmured.

“Immediately,” Alexander promised. “We cleared my afternoon when we saw that
Duke
had
battle damage
.”

#

The Mage-King led Damien to a familiar old-fashioned, wood-paneled study with a roaring fireplace in one corner. A set of overstuffed chairs surrounded the fireplace, completing the illusion of a study predating Earth’s space age.

Of course,
this
study was buried deep inside Olympus Mons, had a gravity less than half of Earth’s, had windows that showed a completely artificial scene, and processed the smoke from the fire with some of the most advanced carbon-capture technology in a hundred systems.

It was an illusion but one Damien knew Alexander found comforting—for all that the era was an illusion, the
age
of the room wasn’t. It had been set up like this by Desmond Alexander the
Second
, and apparently, the current bearer of the name had fond memories of his father in this room.

The current ruler of all mankind got Damien into one of the chairs and grabbed two mugs of steaming tea.

“I have to agree with Kiera, though I’d normally be less forthright about it,” he said finally. “You look awful, and your cruiser looks worse. I’m sure there will be formal reports galore, which I will not have time to read all of, but summarize for me.”

“We were attacked,” Damien began slowly, considering. “Two jumps out from Mars, by the ship that hit Andala. They…” He sighed. “That ship was built like our best. Battleship-grade lasers. Phoenix VIIIs. An amplifier.”

“Damn. How bad did it get?”

“Bad. Neither of us could hurt the other with missiles, so they surprised us with a micro-jump and the battleship lasers,” the Hand said quietly. “Then they hit us with the amplifier—at ten light-seconds.”

Alexander paused, his tea at his lips. He took a slow sip and swallow, then placed the drink on the tray next to his chair for it.

“One of ours,” he said calmly. He wasn’t referring to the ship. “How did you survive?”

“Has a Rune Wright ever been attacked by an amplified Mage before?” Damien asked.

“Not…that I am aware of,” Alexander admitted. “My sister is the only Alexander to have gone into the Navy, and
you
seem to be the only person finding enemies with our own magical weapons.”