Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars Read Online Free Page A

wasn’t an exaggeration - but you didn’t have to leave the hemisphere to avoid it, just travel to the foot of the mountain.
    “Ah, so that’s why you were so eager to join me on this mission,” Alaura concluded. The gray-haired woman perched on the edge of her desk, watching him carefully over the rim of her glass. “I don’t expect Ardennes to get that exciting.”
    “When His Majesty hints that it’s time for one of his pupils to get real world experience, said pupil obeys,” Damien observed dryly. “Also, Kiera is now thirteen, and in the throes of the worst teenage crush I’ve ever seen.”
    It took Alaura a long moment to realize how that related to Damien leaving Mars.
    “On you,” she finally realized aloud. “The girl second in line to the Throne has a crush on you, and your response is to flee the planet?”
    Damien glared at her for a moment, then corrected her.
    “System, Alaura,” he pointed out. “My response to a teenage crush by the daughter of the most powerful man alive was to flee the system .”
    The Hand, one of the thirteen most powerful men and women alive, laughed at him.
    “That seems surprisingly legitimate,” she replied. With a shrug and a hand gesture, she flipped the data on her wrist computer’s display onto a wallscreen.
    “Moving on to our actual job,” she continued, “this is Ardennes.”
    Damien studied the oddly colored planet on the screen carefully. The pale purple native trees were extremely hardy and had managed to spread across easily seventy percent of the planet’s surface. Massive deposits of heavy metals and rare earths, combined with those trees, had made the planet an attractive target for colonization. A massive fault line, clearly visible even in the zoomed out holo, rendered one of the three continents not-quite-uninhabitable, but the other two were temperate and resource-rich.
    “MidWorld with a Navy refueling station,” he said aloud. The MidWorlds were the thirty-three systems that were fully self-sufficient, but didn’t have the massive industrial complexes of the original Core Worlds. “His Majesty said that would be our destination, but I think he believed you would have more up-to-date details.”
    “I do, but not as many as I’d like,” Alaura told him. “One of the - many - warning signs that something isn’t quite right on Ardennes is that the Runic Transceiver Array on the planet is restricted to government use. I’m getting reports, but they’re coming in by more roundabout routes than usual.”
    Damien leaned back in his seat, gesturing for her to continue. One of his many lessons on Mars had been that learning usually required simply listening.
    “Mage-Governor Vaughn has been in charge of Ardennes for thirty years now. That’s unusual, but not unheard of,” she allowed. “In that time, Ardennes has undergone an explosion of industry and resource extraction. Again, this isn’t unheard of, but there are rumors.”
    “We’ve learned the hard way not to ignore those kinds of rumors,” she continued grimly, and Damien nodded. He’d visited a world once where the locals had eventually been forced to overthrow a corporate occupation by force. They’d ended up becoming one of the most rabid UnArcana worlds, blaming the Mages of the Protectorate for not saving them.
    “We began asking questions and slipping agents in a year ago,” Alaura explained. “Shortly before that, small campaigns of violence began to pop up. Nothing really major - a couple of strikes turning into riots, a few bombings. Enough to draw our attention, but nobody died.”
    “That changed about six months ago. Someone began launching a very well organized, very well equipped guerilla war. It lasted a month, maybe two. Then it quieted down - as if someone had made a very specific point.
    “More recently, a series of cruder, more vicious attacks has been launched,” she finished quietly. “Civilians have died - very different modus operandi, but still