Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) (5 page)

#

Mage-Lieutenant Denis Romanov watched the Hand disappear deeper into the prefabricated modules making up the research camp, trailed by his three Secret Service agents for now, then turned to the two Martian Investigation Service Inspectors and his remaining Marines.

“Carmichael, your team is with White,” he ordered, gesturing the other Mage to him. “Mage-Lieutenant, I want you to sweep the exterior of the research camp
and
the alien base. Set up the scanners we brought with us—I don’t trust a bunch of scientists to have set up systems able to see anyone sneaking up on us.”

“Of course,” she said crisply. “Should I pre-cache supplies and weapons as well?”

“Munitions, breather filters, SAMs,” he confirmed after a moment’s thought. “We should be able to deploy in armor and with weapons, but extra ammunition and air supplies won’t go amiss.”

It was paranoid, but it was his
job
to be paranoid.

“Make sure the Service agents know the location of the caches as well as our people,” he ordered. “And include ammo for their systems, too.”

The Martian Secret Service was charged with defending the Mage-King, his family, his Hands, and the members of the Council of the Protectorate. Their preferred weapons systems were lighter and more transportable than his Marines’ gear—and traded having higher maintenance requirements and lower ammunition capacity for comparable performance.

The only real flaw Denis saw in the Secret Service’s heavier gear was that it
couldn’t
trade ammunition with the RMMC rifles. Thankfully, the Service, the Marines, and the MIS all used the same
sidearm
, so ammunition for that wasn’t a concern.

“Isn’t that a little paranoid?” one of the two MIS agents asked as White led Carmichael’s fire team back into the airlock. “This is a murder investigation. Why would we end up outside, living on emergency caches?”

“I don’t know,” Denis told the cop. “But my job until Special Agent Amiri gets back is to make sure that Damien Montgomery survives. Since almost nobody is stupid enough to go straight at a Hand, that means we prepare for what we
don’t
expect to happen.”

He glanced around the prefabricated reception area and concealed a shiver. They had a single armed courier in orbit and the research camp had no defenses. No communication, no support, no backup. He wondered if the Hand had even registered how vulnerable this place was if someone decided to come after him.

“But our job today is to find a murderer,” he told the Inspector with a smile. “My people will stick to yours like glue, but this part is your show. How do you want this to work?”

The spartan nature of the plain entrance and sterile white hallways that made up the prefabricated habitats of the Andala Expedition’s “campsite” didn’t prepare Damien for the crowded reality of Dr. Kael’s office.

It seemed that the Professor had understood exactly how long-term his position as head of the Expedition was going to be, and had brought all of the comforts of home. A massive wooden desk with an old-fashioned leather-and-chrome swivel chair held pride of place in the office—and represented the only clear surface in the room!

Wooden bookshelves had been lined up along every wall, all of them full to bursting with books, printed reports, and miscellaneous artifacts and bric-à-brac collected across a lifetime. There were three comfortable-looking chairs in the room, but all three had books and data disks piled on them.

A side table had been stuffed in beside the desk to add extra workspace and had apparently been sacrificed to the gods of clutter that ruled this place. Unlike the desk, it was covered in the same papers as the rest of the room, only with dirty plates and cups added to the mess.

“You can move the papers on the chairs,” Kael instructed. “Just make sure they stay together—there is a system, though I know it isn’t obvious.”

Damien twitched his fingers and the piles on all three chairs lifted up, neatly organized themselves, and dropped onto the corner of Kael’s desk. Interesting, despite the mess of the
rest
of the office, the professor clearly twitched at there being something on his desk.

The blatant display of power, much as Damien
hated
making it, seemed to settle the point though. The theatrics required for his job grated on him sometimes, but he had no intention of letting the Expedition’s leader mistake their relative positions.

Taking one of the comfortable chairs himself, he waited for Dragic and Zitnik to sit, then gestured for the MIS woman to begin.

“I’ll have questions for you both with regards to Kurosawa’s time here,” she noted, “but for the moment, let’s start with the most obvious. I understand that Mister Zitnik here found the body. Can you tell me exactly what happened?”

The athletic xenoarchaeology student nodded, taking a moment to compose himself.

“About half of the people researching here are postgrad students,” he began. “We’re all assigned to a specific professor, usually on a one-to-one basis. Since Runic Studies is a relatively small specialization, especially for non-Mages, Kurosawa agreed to mentor the three of us in that specialty who ended up here.”

“How did three Runic Studies–specialized students end up here?” Damien asked.

Zitnik coughed and looked uncomfortable.

“Well…” He sighed. “There were no runes here to study, so it was the posting that was left over for the non-Mage students.”

Damien winced but nodded. Non-Mage students in a field like Runic Studies would be at a disadvantage to begin with, since a non-Mage couldn’t be a Rune Scribe and Runic Studies was mostly a precursor to that title. Since non-Mages were rare among those who could
teach
it, mundane students would be the last choice for any work placement.

It made sense, though it also resulted in an immense barrier to creating the non-Mage rune specialists whose unique points of view had been key to many advances in magic over the last quarter-millennium.

“Who are the other students of Doctor Kurosawa?” Dragic asked.

“Myself, Samara Hollins, and Talin Davidyan,” Zitnik told them. “We’re each from different universities—different
worlds
, even. I’m from Tau Ceti, Hollins is from Mars, and Davidyan is from a Fringe World I’d never heard of.”

“All right,” Dragic said after a moment. She was taking notes on her wrist computer via a holographic keyboard only she could see. “So, you were looking for Professor Kurosawa? Why?”

“With the regular courier in system, I’d just received feedback from my university on my draft thesis,” Zitnik told them. “It was positive, but they had some key points I wanted to run by the professor. He wasn’t in his office, but I knew he’d been wandering the facility to try and get a feel for how the Strangers thought.

“He’s also been
really
frustrated over the decision not to open up the lower levels,” the student continued, glancing over at Kael.

That
had
to have been Kael’s decision, Damien realized. It was supportable, certainly, but he doubted the Legatans who’d been underwriting the lion’s share of the Andala Expedition were happy with the pottery and circuitry scraps that had been sent back.
Those
worthies wanted proof of technological FTL.

“He and I hadn’t
talked
about it, but I knew that we had one access to the lower levels that’s close to the base site, and he’d been going and, well, staring at it in frustration,” Zitnik admitted. “I went there to see if I could find him, and found that he’d opened a path.

“It was…impressive, to be honest,” he noted. “The professor had just…moved all the rocks and locked them into place. I’ve seen magic before, but wow.”

“And the professor’s body was past the new entrance he’d created?” Dragic asked.

“Yes,” the young man confirmed with a nod. “I’ll admit I was curious too.
I
couldn’t just open a tunnel into the lower levels, but I wasn’t going to turn around and leave when it was there!

“I saw his light pretty quickly and went to find him. He’d found some kind of gallery, probably an old market area, at a first guess—and the air was
clean
. The runes were still functioning. It was incredible…”

Zitnik sighed, shaking his head.

“And then I realized he wasn’t with his light,” he said softly. “There was a balcony. He’d gone over, fallen about ten meters. He was…” The student swallowed hard. “He was still warm by the time I made it down there, but he was dead.”

“The fall killed him?” Dragic asked. “Could it have been an accident?”

“Miss Volk has his body in cold storage; you can see it for yourself,” Zitnik told them. “He’d been
burned
, Inspector. Like someone had hit him with hot coals. And he was too far away to have fallen—he was thrown. Looked like magic to me, though I’ll admit I don’t know
anything
.

“He was a good man.” The student looked at Dragic and Damien desperately. “I…don’t know why anyone would kill him.
Everyone
liked him.”

“It does sound like magic,” Damien agreed. “Dr. Kael, just to confirm what I’ve been told, there are no Mages in your Expedition?”

“Without any runic artifacts or evidence of magic on the Strangers’ part, there was no need,” the Expedition leader replied. “Doctor Kurosawa was here for his general expertise in xenoarchaeology, not his knowledge as a Rune Scribe. Nobody here could have killed him with magic!”

“We’ll need to inspect the body to be sure,” Dragic said calmly, with a somewhat repressing glance at Damien that he probably deserved. He
had
, after all, agreed to let her run the investigation without interference.

“But first, I think I’d like to go over Doctor Kurosawa’s things, and then I want to interview each of you separately,” she continued. “We have a lot of work to do.”

“Of course,” Kael allowed. “I do ask that you interfere with our research as little as possible. Our work is important.”

Damien managed not to audibly snort, barely. The Andala IV
site
was important, but his study of the literature produced by Kael’s people suggested that their work wasn’t going to find anything of value anytime soon.

“The only interference that is unavoidable is one you probably won’t notice for a bit,” he told Kael. “As of our arrival, no one is permitted to leave or land here without my direct permission. We wouldn’t want our murderer to escape, after all.”

Kael swallowed.

“Of course,” he said faintly. “May I show you to Doctor Kurosawa’s room?”

#

Damien had brought along the Martian Investigation Service Inspectors for two reasons: firstly, while he was qualified to carry out witness interviews, he didn’t have the time to interview even the dozens of people in the research base who had worked directly with Professor Kurosawa, and secondly, because he was
not
able to do forensic investigation himself.

Entering Yoshi Kurosawa’s quarters, his main responsibility was not to interfere as Mara Dragic did her work. Barring Dr. Kael from the room was the work of a moment and a few quiet words, leaving him and the MIS Inspector alone.

Keeping his hands in the pockets of his tailored suit jacket, the Hand surveyed the room. He wasn’t sure how long the professor had been on Andala IV, but he’d tried to make his space homelike. A series of cloth scrolls with calligraphied Japanese poetry hung on the walls, helping cover up the plain metal walls of the prefabricated structure.

Everything else in the room was neatly organized. It wasn’t a large space, basically a bachelor suite with an office instead of a kitchen, but everything was neatly organized and appeared to have a place. The office screens had been shut down and rolled away, and the paper that was there had been neatly organized.

No clothes scattered on the floor, no dirty dishes, nothing. Kurosawa had hardly been an ascetic—there was a tidy little set of glasses around a half-empty carafe of what looked like whiskey to Damien—but he had been organized.

Dragic was making a methodical sweep, a set of tweezers in one hand and a case of bags and tags in the other, but she didn’t seem to be finding much.

The room was…too neat. Wondering, Damien reached for his Sight and swept the room again. He’d never met a Rune Scribe in his life who didn’t have
some
unique little trinket he’d charged with magic, and what it was and where he’d hidden could give the Hand insight into Kurosawa’s character.

He Saw nothing.

With a sigh, he focused more, looking for the glow of energy and channeled magic. If nothing else, a Mage had
lived
here. That left some signs behind.

They were there, but they were…muddled. Mixed up. The whiskey carafe was in the wrong place—Kurosawa had apparently amused himself by using magic to pour his drinks, but he’d done it in the
office,
and the carafe was next to the bed.

There were hints that something quite strongly magical
had
been kept in the desk, but it wasn’t there anymore.

“Are you finding anything, Inspector?” he asked softly.

“Nothing,” she replied. “The room hasn’t been touched since he died. The murderer didn’t come here.”

“Hmm,” Damien hummed stepping further into the room. “No, Inspector,” he said softly, “someone was here. The glasses have residual magic attached to them: Kurosawa was…playing with them, for lack of better description, before he died. There.”

He tapped the edge of the desk.

“A runic artefact was removed from the desk,” he continued. “I would guess…about a day ago. After the professor’s death. Check his file archive,” he ordered. “Full forensic sweep. I suspect you’ll find a number of his files were deleted
very
cleanly about twenty-four hours ago.”

Dragic stared at him, then looked to the glasses and back to him. He’d briefed her on just what his Rune Wright Gift entailed on the way there, but he suspected she hadn’t believed him. Now…she wasn’t so sure.

“Let me check something,” she snapped. Suddenly being
much
less careful, she stepped back to the door and yanked open its control panel, pulling a pair of leads from her wrist computer and plugging them in.

A moment later, she swore.

“Someone entered the room twenty-five hours and sixteen minutes ago,” she stated calmly. “They wiped any record of it from the main systems, but the door has a local log of when it operates to assist with maintenance.

“There were no physical signs in the room,” she continued. “My lord, somebody swept this room and did it so cleanly,
I couldn’t find a sign
. We’re not dealing with a crime of passion. This was a
professional
.”

Damien sighed.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” he admitted. “Check Doctor Kurosawa’s files. See if you can identify what was deleted. We’ll touch base this evening and compare notes.”

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m going to go examine the only thing it makes sense for him to be killed for,” the Hand told her. “It’s time I took a look at these alien runes.”

#

Kael was still waiting outside the room, his arms crossed and tapping his foot, when Damien emerged. The three Secret Service agents not so subtly blocking the path away suggested why he remained despite his clear irritation.

“Find anything, my lord?” he asked.