Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) (23 page)

He removed his stiff gray blazer and slung it over his chair, eyeing the stacks around him balefully.

“If this needle-hunt you’ve got me on, my lord, takes us into the hard storage stacks, we
are
going to have to find minions you can trust,” the Professor concluded. “
I
am certainly not trying to go through the Archive Index on my own!”

Eight hours later, Damien was starting to go cross-eyed. He’d also acquired a new respect for Christoffsen’s capabilities as a researcher. Damien had used a canned program to search the databases at TCNI and was using something similar to sweep through the databases here in the Archives.

Christoffsen was using something he’d presumably written himself, dropping various modules of code into and out of the program as he turned from one database to the next, sweeping the immense sea of data he and Damien had access to for any sign of the Royal Order of Keepers or
Keeper of Oaths
herself.

They’d cleared maybe a tenth of the databases. These were
old
records, from the founding of the Protectorate, and they were not organized or consolidated particularly well at all. Damien didn’t expect to find the
ship
in these files, though he’d looked, but he was hoping to find some information on the founding of the Keepers.

He stood up and stretched, trying to loosen muscles tightened by hours of fruitless research.

“Is this going to get us anywhere?” he asked quietly. “It feels like there should be a better way.”

“We are looking for something that was
buried
, my lord,” Christoffsen replied. “The Keepers were clearly meant to be secret, so we’re not going to find the standard charter and founding documents for a Royal Order.” He stretched himself. “I’ve got spiders running on some of the larger databases, but we could be at this for days.”

Before Damien could put together a constructive response to that, his wrist computer chirped an incoming communication.

“This is Montgomery,” he answered it.

“Hi, Damien, it’s Charlotte,” the other Hand greeted him. “How’s your evening looking?”

Damien glanced around the immense stacks of data storage around him.

“Long and potentially excruciating,” he admitted. “What do you need?”

He wasn’t going to admit
aloud
, where his aide could hear him, that he was hoping for a rescue from the data search.

The woman chuckled.

“Well, I hate to interrupt, but
I’m
headed into Olympus City for dinner and was wondering if I could steal you? I know an adorable little French restaurant, very quiet, very private.”

Damien sighed and began to make his apologies when Christoffsen interrupted him.

“We’ll be at this for
days
, Damien,” the ex-Governor told him. “Go. Don’t choose a night in a library with an old man over a night out with a beautiful woman!”

Damien wondered if his entire staff had been told Charlotte Ndosi had spent the night in his room at their morning briefing or something similar.

“My attempt to admit I’m working has been overruled by my staff,” he told her with a chuckle. “Where do you want me to meet you?

#

The Mountain had an entire
fleet
of air and ground vehicles available for use by government staff and its semi-irregular residents like the Hands and other traveling representatives of the Mage-King. Ndosi’s people had a pair of black sedans waiting for them—one for the Hands themselves plus one bodyguard each, and one for the
rest
of the security details who would accompany them into the city.

It was quite the cavalcade for a quiet date, and from the way the vehicles moved as they traveled out of the tunnel complex, Damien quickly concluded that both vehicles were armored and almost certainly possessed of hidden weapons.

Despite the excessive nature of the convoy in his mind, they made it to Ndosi’s “adorable little French restaurant” in the city. It turned out to be a terraced patio on the higher end of the city, where the diners could look out over both Olympus City with its glittering skyscrapers and the vast green expanse of the foot of the mountain.

It was easy to call Olympus Mons a mountain and forget just how
huge
it was. Not only was the entire complex that ran the Protectorate buried inside it, but Olympus City itself was built along the lower slope of the mountain. Even the green fields of crops in full summer growth that stretched for dozens of kilometers past the City were still, technically, on Olympus Mons.

The tuxedoed maître d’ at the door was clearly expecting them, bowing and ushering them to a set of tables on the top terrace. Damien and Charlotte were seated at a quiet table at the far end of a terrace, and their guards took over the two tables between them and the rest of the restaurant.

“Quite a view, isn’t it?” Ndosi asked as they opened the menus. “Stealey brought me here the first time I was on Mars. It’s one of the best places to see the city from
and
the food is good.”

Damien opened the menu and perused it carefully. Somehow, he wasn’t entirely surprised to see the entire menu in French without translation. He could, with difficulty, read and speak Mandarin as well as his native English. Otherwise, his language ability was limited to using the translator in his wrist computer.

“She and I only spent a few days together on Mars,” Damien said quietly, struggling through the handful of words he knew to identify a dish before giving up and picking one at random. “Most of my time here before was…busy.”

“So I’ve heard. His Majesty ran you pretty ragged, as I understand?”

“If I was getting college credits, my best guess is that I’d have picked up three master’s degrees along the way,” he replied. “Law, criminal justice, and thaumaturgy, plus another equivalent range of studies in being a Rune Wright that I don’t think anyone would recognize.”

They shared a small chuckle.

“Is it true you’re as strong as the King now?” she asked softly.

“No,” Damien told her. “The Runes build on your own natural strength, and I was a middling Mage at best before the Runes. The Alexanders…” He shrugged.

Even in an open-air restaurant, with guards at the entrance and the white noise generator one of the Secret Service Agents had subtly slipped next to their table, he wasn’t prepared to say aloud what he and Ndosi knew to be true: that the Alexander family was
heavily
genetically modified prior to birth to make sure they kept both the Rune Wright Gift and the immense magical Gift of the first Mage-King.

They weren’t
quite
clones. While the Mountain’s geneticists couldn’t
create
the Rune Wright Gift, they had a pretty good idea of what portions of the code needed to remain unchanged to
keep
it, and they allowed as much genetic randomness from the children’s mother in as they could.

Even with an equal number of Runes of Power, all three adult Alexanders could tie Damien in knots.

“I’m not as strong as the Mage-King,” he concluded, “though it’s an academic difference, really.”

He glanced over the menu again.

“I don’t suppose they have a
translation
of this anywhere, do they?”

#

With a little bit of help from their computers, the pair of Hands muddled their way into an astonishingly delicious meal as the sun slowly set over Olympus City. The waiter, speaking in accented English, was prompt and efficient, and the view was incredible.

“It’s amazing how little these people know about what’s going on in the Protectorate,” Ndosi noted as they sipped wine and watched the last of the sunset over the city. “The news is
there
if you look for it—the courier networks are reasonably efficient—but, well, the Antonius Incident almost kicked off a civil war, and I doubt half the people in that city down there could even tell you where Antonius is.”

“They don’t need to,” Damien pointed out. “Our job is to make sure that
nobody
needs to worry about something like that, that any danger will be cut short before it happens.” He sighed. “I’d love to be more successful at it. A
lot
of people died in Antonius before I worked out enough of what was going on to stop it.”

“And if we’d sent, say, Lomond, would any fewer have died?” she asked. “He’s not
quite
the bull in the china shop he pretends to be, but he favors straightforward solutions. Would, say, restricting both militias to their home systems have saved the Antonius colonies?”

He sighed.

“No. It’s hard to be sure, though—the instigators might have simply written it off as a bad deal.”

Two mining facilities, with over a hundred thousand people between them, had been destroyed by agents of powers unknown—but suspected to be Legatus—to try and trigger that civil war. There certainly would have been ways to still make it look like the other system militia was involved, though being able to locate all of the ships of each militia would have reduced the chances.

“And what about Legatus?” she asked softly. “Do you think
that
conflict is something we’ll be able to head off before anyone gets in danger?”

“No,” he admitted. “But I also suspect more than half of the people out there”—he gestured over the terrace—“know about that tension and have their worries. We know they have plans. We have plans of our own.”

She arched an eyebrow at him.

“I haven’t heard any such thing,” she noted.

“If you don’t know, it’s not my place to tell you,” Damien replied, realizing he may have made a mistake. He’d assumed that the other Hand was cleared for Project Weyland by virtue of
being
a Hand, but since his
own
involvement was peripheral, he had no authority to brief her.

Charlotte made a throwaway gesture and smiled at him.

“I know how that works,” she admitted. “Gorgeous as the view is, shall we be getting back to the Mountain? I do have further plans for the evening,” she told him with a wink.

Six days.

Damien and Christoffsen, guarded by Amiri, Romanov and their Secret Service and Marine minions but basically working alone, had been grinding through the databases for six
days
. Only the evenings stolen by Charlotte Ndosi stopped the Hand from going out of his mind.

He was
competent
to do this kind of research, but he didn’t enjoy it. His political aide, nicknamed the Professor for a reason, seemed to find the challenge of it all fascinating. The older man cut through the databases with practiced skill, easily clearing twice the number that Damien did and with a higher degree of certainty.

After six days of nothing, though, it took Damien a solid ten seconds to realize what the notification alert from his console meant. He’d become used to the soft
click-click
of a search complete with no results, so when the console instead went
ding!
, announcing a hard match, it was a shock.

“What have you found?” the Professor asked, coming around to look over his screen.

Damien was pulling the data as the other man asked, bringing up the records and watching in surprise as he found a near-complete match to his data on
Keeper of Oaths
.

“The ship,” he told his aide absently, running through data. “No wonder it was an odd size—it was designed by Desmond the
Second
.”

“Wait, I’m missing something,” Christoffsen said slowly.

“The ship. It’s clearly a Martian design, bigger than a destroyer but smaller than a modern cruiser—which is because it was designed on top of a cruiser hull
ninety years ago
,” Damien explained, pulling the data.

It was
everything
. Full designs and specifications. The engines weren’t right and the weapons suite had been upgraded, but the basic design and its oddities had been preserved from the original specifications the Mage-King’s father’s work on the “Special Purpose Vessel.”

“So, it’s a cruiser with battleship guns,” his aide said, reading over his shoulder. “Why would they have duplicated the old design that closely for that?”

“They didn’t,” Damien said quietly. “They duplicated it for this.” He tapped the rune matrix layout and studied the notes, confirming what his first glance had suggested.

“The amplifier matrix was written to be tunable,” he continued. “From the notes, it wouldn’t work for anyone without a Rune of Power, but for someone
with
the Rune…” He shook his head. “An experienced Rune Scribe with enough information on what the Rune of Power did and what the matrix was designed to do could tune the matrix to a Hand, increasing their power while using the amplifier even
more
.”

If the runes had worked as designed, Damien hadn’t had the range advantage he’d thought he’d had. The other Hand had struck from farther away than any regular Mage could, and apparently farther than even another
Hand
could have.

“Without a Rune Wright to recode the matrix around the tuning, they had to use
exactly
the matrix Desmond’s father wrote,” Damien concluded aloud. “So, they built an obsolete ship, a hundred-year-old cruiser, upgraded with modern engines and weapons, entirely so they could use that matrix and tune it to whichever Hand was using the ship.”

“Are you sure she’s new?” Christoffsen asked. “They could have just upgraded one of the original ships.”

“I’m sure,” Damien said grimly. “We only built two of them, and I recognize both Hands they were built for. Both died in space and their ships went with them.”

“Damn,” his aide said, tapping a command to transfer the same file to his own system.

Damien tuned out the other man, delving deeper into the data. While it wasn’t the ship that had attacked him, it was the only information he could find. The original pair of ships had been built in secret in the Jovian Yards almost a hundred years before, and both had been destroyed, with the Hands they’d been tuned for, before the current Mage-King had taken the throne.

“I wish this was more immediately useful,” he finally admitted. “Knowing where they got the idea is handy but doesn’t help us.”

“Having the exact specifications should help track down who built it, shouldn’t it?”

“Not much more than the data we already had would have,” Damien replied. “I have schematics now, as opposed to just sensor data, but still…”

“How about knowing when the data was pulled and by who?” Christoffsen asked with a laugh.

“What? You can…”

His aide flipped the file
he’d
been looking at onto Damien’s screen. An access log. It showed his access today, when the files had been transferred into cold storage—roughly seventy years ago—and a flurry of accesses five years before by Hand Lawrence Octavian.

“Damn,” Damien murmured. “Bets that Octavian hasn’t reported in in the last week?”

“I am
not
taking that bet.”

#

“Octavian hasn’t been near Sol in about six months,” Amiri reported to the gathering of Damien’s staff in his office. “He was, however, recently involved in mediating a trade dispute in the Alpha Centauri System. His last report home, according to what’s on file, anyway—he may have made a verbal report via RTA to His Majesty without it being recorded—was three days before we left Tau Ceti.”

“That’s plenty of time for his ship to have met us outside Sol,” Damien noted, studying the group for a moment. Romanov was the newest addition, the Marine calm and serious despite having been dragged into the heart of his nation’s government.

Christoffsen and Amiri were just as calm, though with more reason. Both of them had been with Damien in Antonius, defusing a near-war
after
its first massacre. Dealing with a conspiracy at the heart of Mars was, in many ways, a quieter task.

“I don’t suppose he’s officially assigned
Keeper of Oaths
?” the Hand asked his chief bodyguard.

“Octavian is—was—from one of the Martian First Families, descended from one of the Mages adopted into the Eugenicists themselves,” she said quietly. “His family is unimaginably wealthy, so he travels on a personal yacht.”

“Potentially, only as far as
Keeper
,” Damien noted. “Unfortunately, I never met Hand Octavian, and I’m forced to the conclusion that I may have killed him—but given that there were four hundred and eighty-six
other
people on that ship, he’s not the one I’m going to cry over.”

The room was silent for a long moment. Damien was perched on his desk, gaining a tiny bit of the height his frame denied him, looking down at where his staff had occupied the set of comfortable chairs that normally filled the reading nook in the corner with its fake fireplace and serving table.

“Where do we go from here, sir?” Romanov finally asked. “If Octavian had
Keeper of Oaths
built, how does that help us?”

“If nothing else, she was crewed by the Keepers,” Amiri pointed out. “Wherever she was built, they saw almost three hundred people come aboard her. Where did they come from? The schematics were modified to upgrade her weaponry—Octavian wasn’t qualified to do that,
or
to tune the Runes to himself. He was His Majesty’s
trade
czar.”

“Finding the ship would allow us to learn how it was funded, who provided the designs, even, for that matter, if Octavian involved
himself
in the process at all,” Damien noted. “From Mars, I can readily access the Deimos Yards facilities’ computers. The ship wasn’t built there.

“So, she was either built at Earth or Jupiter,” he concluded. “Given the…nature of the work we do at the Jovian Naval Yards, I’d really,
really
like to find that she’d been built at Earth.” He sighed. If nothing else, the entirety of Project Weyland and the top-secret rearmament project being run in fear of Legatus was at the Jovian Naval Yards.

“Of course,
Duke of Magnificence
is in for more repairs, so we’ll need a ship to get to Jupiter,” he noted. “I think that’s our next stop.”

“I think I can do more good remaining here and continuing to search the Archives,” Christoffsen told him. “There may be answers here we have not yet found.”

“I agree,” Damien said. “Romanov—can we have one of your platoons and Mages stay with Christoffsen? No matter what happens, we need him safe.”

“Certainly,” the Marine replied. “Depending on how we’re traveling to Jupiter, I likely will not be able to bring the entire company with us regardless.”

“There are jump ships at the disposal of the Protectorate Government,” Amiri pointed out. “Same as the cars and planes, and since it’s only one jump, we don’t even need to have a Jump Mage assigned.”

“Of course there are,” Damien sighed. He kept forgetting that he was at
Mars
, the center of the Protectorate’s power. He was by no means limited to his own resources.

#

Damien sent Ndosi a message, and the other Hand met him at the exit out onto the landing pad. Even with the doors out onto the mountainside closed, some of the chill of the snow outside made its way into the tunnel.

Clad in a long black dress that matched her skin, Charlotte shivered and wrapped her arms around Damien, he guessed as much to warm herself as to say goodbye.

“I won’t be gone particularly long,” he told her. “I just wanted to make sure you knew I was off-planet for the next day or two.”

“We never know where we get sent,” she reminded him. “I could be gone by the time you get back. Duty is a harsh mistress.”

“We both knew that when we took the Hand. I’m not yet on true leave here, though, and my investigation leads me to Jupiter.”

“Why Jupiter?” she asked, shaking her head at him. “There really isn’t much out there.”

Jupiter had been too far out for there to be much of a human presence before the Eugenicists had seized control of Mars and rendered most of the long-term plans moot. Earth had kept the colony there supplied, but it hadn’t grown much before the Mage-King took over.

It had always been the perfect place for the Royal Navy to build and work in secret. While the Yards were known to take very high-end clients as well,
those
clients never visited the Yards themselves, usually going through everything except final inspections on Mars.

“Only the Yards,” he said quietly. Since he was there, he’d probably inspect the Project Weyland slips as well. It wouldn’t hurt to remind everyone that the highest levels were concerned around
that
secret. “Sadly, I don’t believe they have a souvenir shop; I can’t bring you back a postcard.”

She smiled at him and shook her head.

“I think their souvenirs start at ‘destroyer’ size and go up,” she noted. “Looking for a ship, then?”

“I can’t say too much,” Damien told her. “I trust you, but…we’ve had too many leaks from far too high on this one,” he finished grimly.

“Well, travel safe,” she told him, leaning down to kiss him thoroughly. “And hopefully, I’ll still be here when you get back!”