Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) (25 page)

“It might help to know that Lawrence Octavian is my sister-in-law’s cousin,” Tsukuda finally said, studying the scroll. “This one is his work.” She tapped the artwork. “Done before he was a Hand. I imagine you can guess the quote, given the kind of men and women who become Hands.”

“‘Death is lighter than a feather, duty heavier than a mountain’,” Damien said softly.

“Exactly. I’ve known Lawrence for twenty years. He’s…rude and arrogant at the best of times, but he had the record and skills to back his attitude. He was a trade negotiator for first the Guild and then the Protectorate before he became a Hand. His sense of duty was impressive.

“You’ll understand that I find the thought of Lawrence Octavian committing
treason
almost impossible, but you have the authority to compel my cooperation. Give me a minute to check my files.”

“I don’t know if Hand Octavian is guilty, Yardmaster,” Damien told her. “But
Keeper of Oaths
attacked the Navy ship carrying me. I need to know everything you know about the ship.”

She nodded slowly and stepped over to her desk. Waving her PC over the scanners linked it into the desk’s systems, bringing up both a projected screen and a keyboard.

“Lawrence came to me about five years ago, a year or so after he was elevated to Hand,” she explained. “He had a unique design, utterly archaic, that he wanted us to work on. He had all the papers necessary to install Navy systems, but he wanted to make sure that
nothing
where the rune matrix was involved changed. We had to work around the matrix—he had his own people come in for that instead of using ours.

“Gravity runes, amplifier, everything was done by the Scribes he brought in.”

Tsukuda finally found what she was looking for, replacing the exterior view with a rotating schematic very similar to the one Damien had provided. Studying it, he could pick out the differences. This one had the modernized weapons and battleship-grade lasers the original design had lacked. The engines and reactors were bigger, the nozzles smaller, more modern.

“Do you have any data on the matrix at all?” he asked.

“None,” she said simply. “Lawrence told us it was super-classified, even more secret than the regular amplifier matrix. Something to do with the new rune he was sporting as a Hand.”

Studying the schematics, Damien saw where the rune matrix details would normally be included. All it contained was swathes of black, basically marking those parts of the ship as “do not change.”

“So, you upgraded the design for him?”

“We did,” Tsukuda confirmed. “Upgraded it, refined it, and then ran it past him for approval. He came up with the money for the construction costs—I assumed it was Protectorate funds, but I’ll admit I never checked. He certainly
could
have paid for it himself, though I don’t think even the Octavians would have found that kind of expense easy.”

Most likely, it had been funded by the Keepers, so Damien nodded.

“The ship was finished about three and a half years ago, about eighteen months before we started seriously locking down the Yard for Weyland,” she concluded. “I never heard the name until you mentioned it. She left us as Hull Twenty-Six Seventy-Seven. Lawrence took possession of her personally with a small passage crew of people who definitely
weren’t
Navy. A little suspicious, but he was a friend and a
Hand
.”

All of that was
useful
, but it didn’t give him any more leads. The ship design had been upgraded there, so the people involved in
that
weren’t going to lead him to anything. The passage crew could have been anyone. The only real link he could have would be the runes themselves.

“The Scribes Octavian brought,” he said. “Were you given any information on them?”

“Not even their names,” she admitted. “They came aboard a government jump-yacht much like yours and moved directly aboard the ship. They stayed aboard her while they worked. Except for when they arrived and when they left, I don’t think they spent more than five minutes on the station.”

“But they were aboard Station Alpha?” he asked. “This is a Class One military facility, so everything in the boarding gallery is recorded, correct?”

So was just about everything else aboard the station, though that was something no one liked to think about too much.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “That’s…cold archive data. It’ll take some time to access—and even aboard a military station requires a warrant.”

“Would you like your warrant written or verbal?” Damien asked. “You have my order to pull all records of those Rune Scribes, and I’ll have a written warrant in your hands within the hour. Is that acceptable, Yardmaster Tsukuda?”

With a deep sigh, she nodded.

“It will take us a day or so to pull the correct data,” she admitted. “You are welcome to stay in our visitors’ quarters, but my understanding is that
Doctor Akintola
probably has better quarters.”

Damien chuckled softly. He’d taken a glance inside the main VIP room aboard the yacht.

“Suffice to say I’m not sure if there’s a bath in my quarters or a
swimming pool
,” he noted dryly.

“
Storm of Unrelenting Fury
was thankfully close enough to your position to intercept the missiles before they became a threat to anyone else,” Mage-Captain Jakab reported in the hours-old recording Damien was watching. “SolCom is now backtracking the debris cloud and trying to see who may have planted the missiles—it had to have been done after your flight plan was filed, which reduces our time frame, but…it’s Mars local space. If they can narrow it down to less than fifty ships, I’ll be stunned.”

Duke of Magnificence
’s Captain shrugged.

“They’ll dig, and my people will help. We don’t have much else to do while we fix the latest set of holes. Give us a few days and we may have some new leads for you,” he concluded. “I hope you’re not relying on it, though. There’s a
lot
of traffic around this planet.

“Let me know if there’s anything you need us to handle before you’re back.”

The recording froze. Transmitted hours before, it had taken most of an hour to cross the distance between Mars and Jupiter at the speed of light. Damien had seen it before, but he was playing it for his people now.

“SolCom is good,” he concluded to Amiri and Romanov. “But let’s be honest, it’s quite possible Kole is underestimating the number of ships that may have passed close enough to drop a pod of missiles into the debris cloud. We can’t rely on that.”

“What do we have?” the Marine Mage-Captain asked slowly. “We know the ship was built here, but nobody here seems to know much beyond that.”

“We’ve got this.” Damien tapped his PC, replacing the frozen recording of his cruiser’s captain with an equally frozen image of the boarding gallery on Station Alpha. Seven men and women were in the image. One was the tall, obviously mixed-race form of Lawrence Octavian, clearly a member of Mars’s first families.

Only three of the other six had visible faces, and all were somewhat blurry.

“This, sadly, is the best shot we have of the Rune Scribes Octavian brought to the Yards to install the rune matrix on
Keeper of Oaths
,” he said grimly. “Very clearly, none of the
Scribes
have a clue they’re being recorded—but Hand Octavian
did
and was guiding them on a path that kept them clear of the cameras.

“Fortunately for us, we did manage to get three clean faces out of the mess of video that Yardmaster Tsukuda was able to provide me,” Damien continued. “Normally, I would simply send the images to Mars and ask the MIS to identify them for me. Since I’m not sure there is
anyone
in this system who didn’t come with us that I can trust, we’re going to need to return to Mars and access their databases directly.”

“Surely, we can trust the Investigation Service?” Amiri asked. “Or, perhaps more accurately, we have friends in the MIS we can trust?”

“Most of my friends in this system are in the top of the government,” Damien admitted. “The MIS people I know are scattered across three systems, and none of them are Sol. If
you
know anyone, of course?”

“Every MIS person I know is either in the same systems as you or the type of Fringe officer who issues bounties,” she admitted. “Denis?”

Romanov blinked.

“Why are you looking at
me
?” he asked.

“You grew up here,” Damien pointed out. “Neither of us did.”

“I think I have a friend’s cousin who went into MIS,” he said slowly. “But no one I’d trust this far. But…”

The Marine paused, and Damien gestured for him to carry on.

“If you have a thought, Denis, please share it,” he ordered. “I’m hardly perfect; there’s a reason we’re having this conversation.”

“Most likely, the Keepers are based on Mars,” Romanov said slowly. “You were talking about checking out both Jupiter
and
Earth. If we proceed to Earth, they may think we didn’t find anything out here, and it would
also
allow us to access the MIS databases there. The planetary databases are mirrored to each other for ease of operation.”

“How do you know that?” Amiri asked. “
I
didn’t know that, and I’ve been briefed on MIS procedures here.”

“I don’t know anyone in MIS,” Romanov replied, “but I do know some cops back on Earth. If we want to do this completely under the radar, they
do
have access to the system databases with the right warrant.”

#

This time, Damien took
Doctor Akintola
out the full two million kilometers, making sure they were well away from the interference of Jupiter’s titanic gravity well. The view as they made their trip outward was mind-boggling, half of the gas giant’s moons currently visible as the yacht burned away from the planet in all of its glorious colors.

Once they were past Ganymede, the massive half-built hulls of the dreadnought squadron rapidly became invisible, shielded from prying eyes by Jupiter and its children. Damien wished he could regard the construction of the new ships, an immense leap in firepower over the ships the Martian Navy currently had, as pure paranoia. An unnecessary precaution.

But someone had blown two small colonies apart from orbit, killing over a hundred thousand people, to try and start a civil war already. That a conspiracy appeared to have nestled itself into the heart of the Protectorate’s government didn’t make him any more comfortable that war could be averted.

It wasn’t like they could challenge Legatus and slap them down. They didn’t have enough evidence—and the sad truth was that even if they did, Damien wasn’t sure that politics would allow them to, anyway. It wasn’t like the UnArcana worlds didn’t have a
point
about the flaws of the Protectorate, after all.

The Keepers themselves were a sign of that. Born of the first Mage-King’s paranoia, ordered to conceal secrets likely inherited from the Eugenicists… He shivered.

The Eugenicists’ sought-after “master race” had turned on them in the end, but that didn’t mean the Mages hadn’t ended up in charge anyway. Damien had never really questioned that, though he had grown to question the Compact that called for Mages to try their own and similar rights.

Now, though…if
one
conspiracy had survived amidst the Mage rulers of the Protectorate, who was to say there was
only
one? The Eugenicists had been a cult and a conspiracy before they’d overtaken Mars and become a government. Enough of the Mages who’d worn a Eugenicist uniform had been allowed to defect that Damien had to wonder.

“Scanners look clear, Damien,” Amiri told him, her voice cutting through his thoughts.

He checked the numbers himself and nodded. They were far enough out from Jupiter that he could jump now, but he stared at the simulacrum for a long moment.

“Damien?” Amiri asked. “Are you all right?”

“This whole sneaking around because we can’t trust our own people is started to wear
really
fucking thin,” he said sharply. “This is
Sol
. We should have infinite resources: money, ships, trustworthy people.” He shivered. “This conspiracy bullshit is getting to me.”

“It’s getting to all of us,” she told him. “Though, frankly, your job has enough of that everywhere else, too. I don’t see His Majesty sending you anywhere quiet and calm to, I don’t know, judge a cat show, do you?”

The image of a room full of cats being carried around, groomed and presented for Damien—who was only vaguely familiar with the critters at best—to judge made him chuckle.

“Fair,” he admitted. “It’s the job, but…damn, Mars is supposed to be where we come to relax.”

“Then fix it,” Amiri said. “That’s
also
your job. Can’t say any of the rest of us could do it.”

He smiled sheepishly and slowly nodded.

“Earth, then,” he said aloud, laying his hands on the simulacrum. “I’m going to miss you, you know.”

“I know. But you’ll do fine.”

#

It was strange. Despite having spent three years in Sol, Damien had never actually been to Earth. Yet the blue-green orb beneath him looked heart-achingly familiar to his eyes. It wasn’t the faint purple of his homeworld’s oceans or, indeed, exactly the hue of any of the oceans he’d visited since leaving his home, but the blue looked perfect and normal to his eyes. The green, the fluffy white clouds, everything looked strangely
right
, even to eyes that had never seen it before.

“All right,” he said slowly as Romanov settled in behind him in the tiny shuttle, which was barely big enough for his two senior bodyguards and the minion apiece they’d brought. “Now, this will sound stupid, but which one’s Ireland?”

“Well, firstly, we’re currently orbiting above Mexico, so you can’t see it,” the Marine officer pointed out. “But.” He leaned forward and tapped a sequence into the computer, which happily provided a waypoint.

“Those are the coordinates for the Dublin Metroplex Spaceport, near where I grew up,” he explained. “One of the girls I grew up with now runs the Sector Six Office of the Dublin PD. It’s twenty minutes by taxi or transit line from the DMS.”

“We’ll probably want to keep my presence on Earth quiet,” Damien noted. “While the Keepers know I’m on the planet, if they realize I’m talking to cops, they may draw, well, the right conclusions.”

“I can talk to Wanda on my own,” Romanov offered. “I’ll need a warrant, something to cover
her
ass as she accesses the databases for us.”

“I can give you a digital one,” the Hand agreed. “Amiri and I will hang out at the spaceport, if you end up needing us we can catch up.”

“Backup is handy,” the Marine agreed, sounding even more serious and subdued than usual. “I’m not the target, but that doesn’t mean the Keepers won’t take a shot if I’m in the open.”

“If you go down, it makes Montgomery more vulnerable,” Amiri agreed. “Watch your back. We can commandeer a spaceport security chopper and be on your six faster than you might think, but we still won’t be right there.”

“I’ll be careful,” Romanov promised.