Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) (8 page)

“Dammit, Pokorni,” Damien snapped. The armed courier had an
amplifier
. There wasn’t much that could destroy her before reaching the range of her captain’s enhanced magic.
That
was going to be a problem for another time. “What am I looking at?” he demanded.

“She’s not a freighter, too small, too fast,” the Mage-Lieutenant-Commander replied. “Some kind of warship, but not like anything I’ve ever seen.
Szar!
My lord, they’ve dropped a rock toward the planet.”

“A rock?” Damien demanded. “Not a bombardment weapon?”

“Looks like just a chunk of asteroid, my lord.”

Damien glanced up. A rock wouldn’t accelerate much until it hit the core of Andala IV’s gravity well, but if the ship was at an approach velocity, it would still only take a minute or so to hit the ground. It was slower than an actively accelerating smart kinetic bombardment projectile but would be perfectly effective at wiping the research base and the alien ruins from the planet.

And it would look natural. Unless, of course, there were witnesses.

“Listen to me, Pokorni,” he said quickly. “Run for safe space and
jump
as soon as you can.
Keep
jumping. Cycle your entire crew in the next ten minutes and make random jumps. Return once you can do so safely, with at least one Mage ready to jump you
out
if they’re still here!”

“What about you, sir?”

If she’d
really
cared, she might have tried
fighting
, but Damien sighed. TK-421 couldn’t face any real warship, not one with an amplifier, anyway.

“That’s up to me now,” he said grimly. “
You
need to get away so that no matter what happens, Mars knows this wasn’t an accident. Do you understand me?”

Pokorni swallowed hard enough that he heard it on the voice link.

“Yes, my lord.”

“Then
go
.”

Cutting the channel, he turned to Romanov. “Please tell me we have some kind of sensor network set up.”

“I’m linked into the research base’s traffic control radar,” the Marine replied. “My people were supposed to set up more, but none of them are turned on and…well, I think White killed them.”

“Link me in,” Damien ordered. “Then track the vector for the rock. I’ll need your help.”

“What are we doing?”

“You’re calling directions,” the Hand said grimly. “
I’m
stopping an orbital bombardment.”

Romanov paused, looking at him very carefully.

“Can you
do
that?”

“I’ll tell you in about ninety seconds,” Damien replied.

Seconds passed with excruciating slowness. The bright light that had detached from the ship grew lower and larger as the chunk of whatever rock they’d acquired continued on its deadly route, and Damien studied its path on the pathetic excuse for radar the research base had assembled.

He inhaled deeply as it drew nearer. This would be something beyond even
his
experience. Without an amplifier and its attendant simulacrum and sensors, he couldn’t deflect or destroy the projectile with a carefully timed strike as he would an incoming missile.

He was going to have to
stop
a rock that had been dropped from orbit. At least Andala IV was a relatively low-gravity world. Even that one-tenth gravity difference compared to Earth would make a huge difference to the final velocity of a dropped rock with no acceleration.

“Aimed well,” Romanov noted. “It’s headed right for the center of the ruin. Won’t leave much of this place but a crater.” He paused. “Fifteen seconds.”

Damien nodded and exhaled the breath he’d drawn in. With that exhalation he drew power into his Runes, feeling them heat up. A simple shield of force sprang into existence above the ruin and the research base.

Simple. But immense. Even with the vector they had, Damien needed to cover several square kilometers of sky—with enough strength to stop a probably kiloton-range weapon.

He could
feel
the Runes. Despite what most non-Mages thought when they saw them, they weren’t tattoos. Each of his Runes of Power was made of a flexible silver-polymer inlaid a full millimeter and a half into his skin, and he could feel the heat from every bit of that surface as he channeled more power than he ever had before.

Then the rock hit.

It was a twenty-five-ton projectile carved out of a nickel-iron asteroid. The attempt to make it look natural meant it came in slowly for a kinetic bombardment weapon, and the attackers had made up for the lack of speed with sheer size. Traveling at over a hundred kilometers a second, it hit Damien’s shield with the force of a thirty-kiloton bomb.

The sky above them lit up with white fire fading to sparks as drops of molten metal flung themselves dozens of kilometers in every direction. Damien physically lurched away from the blow, the force of the impact cracking the concrete under his feet as he passed the force he couldn’t control through himself.

“My god,” Romanov whispered, staring at Damien. “How… That’s
impossible
.”

“I am the Hand of the Mage-King of Mars,” Damien whispered, wavering on his feet as a wave of exhaustion swept through him. His breath came in short, heavy bursts, but he was alive—and so was everyone else. “And even I wasn’t sure that was possible,” he admitted with a grin, suddenly feeling
very
young.

“Damn. Why do you have bodyguards again?” Romanov asked, returning the grin around the breathers they both wore.

“Because I only have one set of eyes,” Damien pointed out, then paused as Romanov was suddenly refocused on the computer again.

“New launch,” he said grimly. “I’m tracking an active projectile, moving
fast
,” The Marine swallowed. “Sir, that’s a Talon Seven. That’s
ours
.”

Somehow, Damien wasn’t surprised in the slightest. The downside was that the Talon Seven was a multi-impactor weapon capable of over a thousand gravities of acceleration. Each of the Talon Seven Orbital Impactor’s submunitions would arrive with almost twenty times the kinetic energy of the rock they’d dropped before—and as the name implied, it would deploy seven of them prior to impact.

“ETA and vector?” he asked, his voice far calmer than he felt. Stopping the rock had been hard enough. He really didn’t think he
could
stop a Talon Seven. Certainly, even if he could,
no one else
could.

“Sixty-five seconds. There.” Romanov pointed. “It’s separating,” he said grimly. “Sub-impactors activating their own engines.”

“Only one target; they’ll go for different angles,” Damien said aloud, thinking through what he had to do. Shielding
everything
was the only option.

“I’m sorry, Mage-Lieutenant,” he told Romanov. “I don’t know if I can do this. But I’ll do what I can. If you’re religious, I’d suggest praying.”

“God helps those who help themselves, sir,” the Mage-Lieutenant replied seriously. “They’re splitting up, as you predicted.”

Damien swallowed, nodded to the Marine, and raised his hands to channel power once more.

A shimmering barrier of pure kinetic force, the energy field that science fiction had predicted and science had failed to deliver, snapped into existence, an invisible dome over people who were barely aware they were under attack.

The Runes inlaid in his flesh
burned
. He wondered if he’d have been able to smell his own flesh without the breather—his suit certainly didn’t appear to be surviving the process, as curls of smoke rose around him.

The first impactor drove him
through
the shattered concrete under his feet. The ancient artificial rock crumbled into dust as kinetic energy ran through him into the ground. Suddenly, he was several centimeters into the soil under the concrete.

The second and third impactors arrived simultaneously, driving him to his knees in agony, but he still held the shield.

The next
three
arrived in the same instant from different angles, lighting the sky up with fire as they hammered against Damien’s shield. His power,
somehow
, held as the infinitesimal fraction of surviving force ground his knees into the pulverized concrete and alien soil. He could feel blood dripping down his face, and he didn’t have the time or energy to wipe it away.

The last missile came directly down the middle, trailing the rest by a tenth of a second due to an overestimation of how long the rest would take to adjust their courses. It hammered into his shield from above, lighting up the next sky like an impossibly close sun, and Damien
felt
his shield crumple. Bend.

He crumpled and bent with it, his shield failing as his eyes wavered, unwilling to see as his entire
body
screamed against the strain of what he’d called on his power to do.

He let the shield go as he found himself face-first on the cracked alien concrete. Part of his mind wondered, almost idly, where all the blood had come from.

#

While Denis Romanov had never seen thaumic burnout in person, it had been covered in his training. Like the Navy it worked with, the Royal Martian Marine Corps was fundamentally a peacetime military—but it tried to be a well-trained, well-equipped one.

There was enough blood leaking from Montgomery’s face that the Marine really wasn’t quite sure what to do. The normal rule in this situation was to relieve the overwhelmed Mage and replace them with someone else, even if that person couldn’t do the job quite as well.

Denis himself was the only Mage available, and he couldn’t do what the Hand had done at
all
. He knelt by the collapsed, bleeding Hand and tried to check for a pulse.

“I’m alive,” Lord Montgomery told him, coughing behind his breather. “Where are our friends?”

Denis checked. His helmet was only showing a ghost icon now; the attacker had gone over the horizon.

“We’re out of line of sight—and probably fire,” he told the Hand. “The base’s sensors suck, but my comp is calling it thirty to seventy minutes before they complete their orbit.”

Montgomery slumped onto the shattered ground around him for a moment, then raised his bloodied eyes to look at Denis.

“Your people were laying out SAMs,” he noted. “Where did they end up?”

“I don’t know,” Denis admitted. “White was with them and I haven’t heard from them.”

“
Find them
,” the Hand ordered, his voice harsh. “Most likely, they’ll assume I can do that again, in which case the next step will be to send in ground troops.”

“I…only have sixteen Marines left, sir.”

“That’s why you need the SAMs.” A small click in Denis’s comm system announced that Montgomery had opened a wider channel.

“Dragic. I need you to coordinate with whoever the hell you can find in charge in there,” the Hand told the MIS Inspector. His voice was even harsher now, and Denis wondered just how much damage the other Mage had done to himself.

“We’ve got Dr. Kael out,” the Inspector replied. “What do you need?”

“You have twenty-five minutes to get every single person in that compound into the lower levels of the alien base,” the Hand ordered. “We’re under orbital attack and I expect to see ground landings shortly. The civilians will be safest at the bottom of a hole, and conveniently, the aliens left us a deep reinforced one.”

Silence.

“I’ll make it happen,” she said steadily. “Be in touch.”

Ignoring the brusqueness of the Inspector, Denis brought up his own links.

“Marines, come in,” he snapped. “We are under attack. Anyone in an exosuit needs to get out here and find Carmichael’s fire team and the surface-to-air missiles they were supposed to be caching.

“The rest of you, get
in
exosuits and come join me outside. We have work to do.”

Cutting the channel, he turned back to Montgomery.

“What happens if they
do
bombard us again?” he asked, eyeing the bloodied state of his boss.

“We die, Lieutenant,” the Hand told him. “So, we’ll plan for the alternative.”

#

Dragic was more efficient than he had any right to expect, Damien reflected. The time frame he’d given her was impossible, but she’d managed to get over a thousand people organized and streaming into the lower levels of the ancient base before it ran out.

He’d spent the same time trying to wipe blood off of his face with only moderate success. He couldn’t spare the energy to purify air for himself, so he’d had to leave the breather—and the dried nosebleed under it—in place.

“We found the rest of the SAMs,” Corporal Kitcher, leader of the exosuited Marine fire team sweeping for Corporal Carmichael and his people. They’d found three of the caches placed exactly as per plan, each containing two Hyper-Interceptor two-stage surface-to-air missiles.

“We’ve found Carmichael’s people,” Kitcher concluded. “White took them out with magic from behind. They would never have seen her coming.” The Marine paused. “She disabled the last six SAMs. Initiator stages are bled dry; they’re just antimatter bombs now.”

“Bring them back anyway,” Romanov ordered. “They may still come in handy.”

What was disturbing to
Damien
was that three caches had been placed as planned before White had turned on the Marines. It was like she’d been doing her job, perfectly efficiently, until someone
else
had told her to stop—and she’d immediately, without hesitation, turned on and murdered the Marines working with her.

Something
stank
to Damien and he didn’t like the implications.

The Marine Mage-Lieutenant was looking at Damien, his expression hidden behind his helmet. Romanov had been the last of his people to get into exosuit armor, but the palms of his suit had small runes inlaid into them, allowing him to still use his magic.

“Is there anything you can do, my lord?” he asked quietly.

“If I
do
, I definitely won’t be able to stop another bombardment,” Damien admitted. He didn’t think he could stop a bombardment either way—but he needed to conserve
all
of his energy for that possibility.

“We’ll do what we can,” Romanov replied. “We’re going to fall back underground pretty quickly in that case.”

“I have radar signatures,” Corporal Chan, leading one of the three fire teams that had joined Lieutenant Romanov out with Damien, interrupted. “Not the ship, not yet, but I’m reading ten shuttles.”

“Any kind of detail?” Damien demanded.

“Not with
these
sensors,” the Corporal said bitterly. “We got five minutes until they’re on top of us.”

“Lieutenant,” Damien said quietly, “you are authorized to shoot them down. No warning. No second chances.”

“They tried to
nuke
us, sir,” Chan demanded—and Damien could feel the Marine’s questioning glance through the man’s faceless armor.

“And that is why we are going to kill them all,” Damien told him. “But the responsibility remains mine.”

“Kitcher, you’ve got the birds,” Romanov ordered, ignoring the byplay between his superior and his noncom. “Fire at will.”

The Marines must have been setting up the remote-controlled weapons as they found them, as a Hyper-Interceptor took two minutes to set up and needed a thirty-meter safety zone to launch…and all six missiles lifted off inside five seconds of the order.