Free Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) by Glynn Stewart Page A

inlaid into his forearm was now fully visible, and with a chill, Damien realized that the mine hadn’t been meant to kill him. It had been meant to break or damage the Rune, one of the five that made him, born a Mage of average strength, the second most powerful Mage alive.
    No matter who his attacker was, they shouldn’t have known about those Runes. One was inlaid on the right forearm of every Hand—more than one was only possible when a Rune Wright was designing the Runes on themselves, unfortunately—but the source of the Hand’s extraordinary power was kept secret.
    “Right,” he muttered aloud, forcing his shield forward as a second salvo of grenades launched out of the darkness. “Time’s up.”
    He caught the grenades with his power and flung them aside as he charged forward. A tighter shield wrapped around him now, protecting him as a series of mines at the right height and angle to hit a Hand’s Rune fired off as he passed them.
    Another sweep of power caught up the projectiles and explosive force of those weapons and brought them with him. His Sight picking out the Mage in the tunnels with him, he threw all of that force directly at them.
    The speed and power of the shield they conjured answered his question. His attacker was a trained Combat Mage—and almost certainly Kurosawa’s killer.
    “Why’d you kill the doctor?” he demanded, following a trail he was sure the assassin didn’t know they were leaving.
    “Orders,” a feminine voice replied, though his Sight showed she was somewhere different from the source. Probably a speaker. “Same as you. Some secrets must be kept, no matter the price.”
    “You know you can’t kill me,” he said quietly. “Turn in your employers and I can arrange clemency.”
    “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she snapped. The voice was still coming from in front of him, but she’d taken another tunnel and was sneaking around behind him, using the speaker as a distraction. “I am a Keeper and my oaths will be kept !”
    She lunged from the corridor, a long rune-encrusted knife, presumably designed to cut though a Mage’s shield, in her hand.
    Damien’s power flared in the underground tunnel, the Runes of Power across his body flashing with heat as he caught her arm, overcoming the knife’s runes with sheer overwhelming power and stopping her in mid-strike.
    Frozen in the moment, he got a good look at his attacker for the first time. She was dressed in the same plain lab utilities as everyone else on the base and wearing light-gathering optics above her breather. He couldn’t see her eyes, but the cast of her face made her anger clear.
    She twisted to escape his hold—and then her arm snapped like a twig, the knife falling from nerveless fingers as Damien tried to maintain his hold. Her other had lifted the deadly-looking carbine she’d been firing earlier.
    He lashed out with a bolt of pure force. He was trying to just stop the weapon, but he lost a degree of fine control when he was doing multiple things at once. Her arm snapped back, the second limb snapping in a handful of moments.
    “Others will come,” she told him, her voice thick with pain. “The secret will be kept.”
    Then she spasmed, the distinct convulsions of poison. Damien dropped her, pulling clean air around them as he desperately tried to pull off her breather to force out whatever pill she’d taken.
    Despite his power, he was only human. By the time he got the face mask off, her mouth was full of foam and her convulsions were weakening. He stared at her in horror as she gave one final full-body convulsion…and stopped.
     

Chapter 9
     
    The tunnel behind Damien had collapsed as the explosions rippled through it. They’d been closer to the surface than he’d initially thought, though, as he could see the sky through the holes. If he hadn’t already been wearing a breather, the atmosphere could have been a problem.
    The assassin was a slight woman, not much taller