Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) Read Online Free

the only Mage in the system.”
    “So, a mystery,” Damien murmured. Despite himself, he was intrigued—though he still didn’t see just why the Admiral had reached out to him. “I believe the Martian Investigation Service has a Tau Ceti station. We can spare a Marine escort with a few Combat Mages to keep the MIS team safe, can’t we?”
    “We can, but I did contact you for a reason, my lord,” Segal replied. “Damien…Kurosawa found what he was looking for. His students found at least one fully functioning rune matrix in the room where they found his body.”
    A fully functioning rune matrix.
    A fully functioning alien rune matrix. That was the dream of any Rune Scribe like Kurosawa—and Damien finally understood why Segal had contacted him.
    “I could send an MIS team and a dozen Rune Scribes,” Segal told him. “Or…I could ask a Rune Wright, who’ll sort out in an hour what would take the Scribes a year, to take a look.
    “And since said Rune Wright is a Hand , with more investigative and police authority than any MIS team…”
    Damien snorted and conceded the point.
    There were, to his knowledge, exactly five Rune Wrights in the Protectorate. Two were the minor children of the Mage-King of Mars. Two others were the Mage-King of Mars and his sister. The last was Damien Montgomery himself.
    Unlike other Mages, the Rune Wrights could see the flow of magic in runes, understand the use of a rune matrix in a glance instead of taking painstaking hours to read it. The additional understanding meant that Damien and the others could do many things ordinary Mages couldn’t—among other things, design the Runes of Power that they carved into their flesh, dramatically augmenting their own power.
    That same Sight would enable him to read alien runes, understanding them regardless of how much or little they shared with humanity’s script.
    “I’ll still need the MIS team,” he told Segal. “My Secret Service detachment is down to the bare minimum. I am on vacation,” he pointed out. “I’ll also need a ship. Duke of Magnificence is several weeks from being ready to deploy again.”
    “I have a Navy armed courier I was going to put at the Investigation Service’s disposal,” Segal replied with a grin. “I can place it at your command instead.”
    “I’ll take it,” Damien agreed. “I’ll need to speak to His Majesty first, though. This does seem sufficiently low-key, I think he’ll agree to let me cut my vacation short.”
     
    #
     
    Unlike the Andala System with its tiny research base or even many of the poorer systems of the Protectorate, Tau Ceti had a Runic Transceiver Array. Unlike even wealthier system, Tau Ceti had two—one for each of the two inhabited worlds, Tau Ceti e and Tau Ceti f .
    The system had been one of the earliest settlements after the first Mage-King concluded the Compact that defined the relationship between man and Mage, and it had the wealth and industry to show it. Massive stations orbited ahead of each world, shielding them from the fields of meteors and comets that had regularly shattered the biospheres of both worlds before humanity had settled them.
    Amidst the many signs of wealth and progress were the RTAs. Many systems didn’t have any. Damien’s own homeworld of Sherwood had been more able to afford an entire fleet of warships than a single Array. The Sherwood Array, partially funded by the Protectorate after the events of the last few months, would come online soon.
    The nature of the Arrays prevented more than one being installed on a planet: they flung the voice of a Mage inside them across the galaxy to the target world and were only so accurate. Even an entire planet was a tiny target on that scale.
    Tau Ceti was the only system with two of the massive black spherical facilities. Sol alone had more, with one each on Earth, Mars and Ganymede.
    Damien’s rank and authority cleared him a fifteen-minute slot at the Tau Ceti f Array. His Marines led the way